Whale Watching Report

Labels: Nice Catch

A beautiful fall day on the Salish Sea with the Orca Whales. Stay tuned for updates from Naturalist Jami Nagel. "Sunny skies to kick off October. As we made our way around the southend of Lopez, Captain Carl took us past Colville Island where there were numerous harbor seals hauled out on the rocks. Making our way along the westside of Lopez Island we were treated to the elusive minke whale. The one today anyway was being elusive, giving us a couple good looks. We moved further north where we were in for a treat! A couple miles offshore of the westside of San Juan Island we encounter all 3 of our resident pods, we call this a super pod. The whale were very active today with breaching, spyhopping, taillobing, and even a cartwheel. We had some great looks at J26 Blackberry, L87 Onyx, J8 Spieden, and K11 Georgia to name a few. We also encountered common murres, rhinoceros aucklets, surf scoters, cormorants, harbor seals and bald eagle." -Naturalist Jami Nagel

The Island Explorer 3 is on-scene with Orca Whales - stay tuned for updates from Naturalist Kate Janes.

Cruising Through Glass Water (Gaia L78)

Photo by Naturalist Kate Janes

9/30/2009: We started out our trip today with beautiful blue skies and calm water. Our first stop was at Colville Island where we spotted a bald eagle and several harbor seals. We eventually searched for whales all the way out to Canada. A few minutes after we crossed the border near Victoria we spotted a whale surfacing among a large flock of gulls. We saw it come up twice but we didn't get a good look at what species it was. Judging by the size and shape of the blow it must have been a humpback whale or a gray whale. We stopped and waited for the big cetacean to surface again, but after a long search we were not able to spot him again. While we were looking for the whale we spotted several unusual birds for our area. We saw hundreds of sooty shearwaters, a few pink-footed shearwaters, and a pomarine jeager. These are birds that spend most of their lives out in the open ocean. We were not able to spot another whale today so we handed out fluke passes to all our passengers. The fluke passes allow them to come back and ride with us for free again until they are able to see whales with us. That is how our guarantee works. Even though we didn't get a good look at whales today our passengers saw lots of wildlife variety and they had a great time. We had several bird watchers from Europe that added many birds to their life lists today. We also spotted harbor porpoises, marbled murrelets, common loons, pacific loons, pigeon guillemots, common murres, and all three of our cormorant species today. Naturalist Bart Rulon