Sept 1

Today was a great day. We decided to go see the T36B’s and T137s and it’s a good thing as we got to see the T36B baby still orange. The calf was born this year. And was very playful. We saw it jump out of the water multiple times!

All the whales were super active for the whole hour we were with them. Jack T137A gave us a lot of pectoral slaps and some breaches. Everyone was tail slapping, rolling and jumping. An amazing show!

 

Sept 2

We saw seals and sea lions on our way to meeting up with T49A1 &T65A5 on the east side of Sucia. We followed the boys on a lap around Sucia ending up at Clemens Reef where they came by with really close passes. We got great looks at their eyes and dorsals.

The pair turned north and we followed them for a bit while they zig zagged. We ended up getting a few more close pass looks before having to head back.

 

Sept 3

We had to go pretty far today, and headed down south of Smith Island to catch up with reports of the T36’s today. We booked it down to them so we could spend our full hour with them. We ended up scoring good looks at the whole pod, including the baby calf.

We saw a ton of sea lions at Whale Rocks on our way back too.

 

Sept 4

We got to see a humpback today for the first time in a while. It was near Saturna Island, out in Canada so we had to cover a lot of ground to get to it. But we still managed to have an hour with the whale. We weren’t able to identify it, even though we got some decent looks at its fluke.

We suspected it to be a juvenile we don’t have in our records. He was surfacing pretty regularly, and so we got decent looks. He eventually came up close enough times, we had to go into neutral and wait for him to head out.

On the way back we saw sea lions at Clemens Reef, and harbor seals at Migley Point.

Sept 5

Today was a great day! We started with Viti Rocks where the tide was really low. Tons

of harbor seal friends. We then went down Bellingham Channel and viewed the Burrows Island Lighthouse. From there we went west to hangout with the T18s near Bird Rocks, The T18s are known for having two large males born to T19. T18 herself was not with them.

T19B is Galiano, a huge male with a left leaning dorsal fin and a notch. His brother, T18C Spouter, is younger and has a wavy dorsal fin. The two males were swimming together mostly but eventually caught back up with mom.

It was super interesting to see the size difference between the males and mom.

 

Sept 6

We saw lots of sleepy harbor seals and cormorants in their nests on Viti. We also made a pit stop to a navigation marker to hangout with some Stellers. There were 4 on and one trying to make its way up.

We made our way south down Rosario, and slowed down to squeeze between the beautiful Castle rock and the south end of Lopez Island. From there, we continued south until we met up with two humpbacks.

They were identified to be “Allusion” and “Megé”. Their tail flukes were very different and it was fun to compare. Megé has a very white fluke, while Allusion hosts a pretty dark one. They were hanging out pretty close to the surface, so we could see their “footprint” even when they were traveling underwater.

It was so pleasant out on the water and got to see lots of good wildlife!

 

Sept 7

We started off today with an early whale sighting right of Viti Rocks!

BCY 1072 Nalu did many shallow lunges with lots of looks at her tail. We didn’t stay for long though, because there were already early reports of orcas nearby too.

We moved on to the Wasp Islands to watch three male orcas: T60D&E,

The bachelor orca group moved into Deer Harbor amongst a lot of boats for some difficult viewing, but for some interesting juxtaposition with people on paddleboards. The male group cruised right under the paddlers and gave them a bit of a surprise. It really showed their massive size difference compared to humans. We watched them as they left the Orcas Island shoreline towards Waldron Island, before we had to head home.

It was a lovely double whale day, with a lot  of harbor porpoise activity as well.