Act 2: Are there Orcas on Orcas Island?

No.  Blog post over, I guess you can go back to whatever it was you were doing, which is probably cooking Thanksgiving dinner.

Well, on second thought, yes!  There are wooden orcas, painted orcas, and even glass orcas.  But real orcas live in the water, so to have the best opportunity to see orcas, you have to go out onto the water, which is where we spent the afternoon!

We took off from the north of the island, so we immediately got a view of Mt. Baker similar to the one we saw from Mt. Constitution, except this time from water level.

One of the things you have to do when whale watching is find them!  Fortunately, there are a lot of other things - many in the water, some out of it - to see, but then again, you have to find them too.  So everyone on board is on the look out for . . . pretty much anything!

Just to let you know, we did not go shopping for matching outfits before our adventure.  In some places they require you to wear life vests when out on the water.  In the Straight of Juan de Fuca, they make you wear survival jackets - insulated jackets that are also floatation devices.  They tell you to dress warmly for the trip, even so, the jackets helped a lot, especially once the boat started flying.  It is cold on the water, I can’t imagine what it’s like to take a dip in it!

Fortunately, there is a network of whale watching boats that tend to keep each other in the loop about where the whales are.  Nobody likes to go out and not see any whales - it’s bad for business.  The San Juan Islands have several pods (a group of whales is a pod) that hang around the island most/all of the year, and several annual pods that migrate to and from the islands.  The key questions wind up being, are there any pods around on any given day, and where are they?  We got word that a pod had been sighted south of San Juan Island, so we sped as fast as we could through the island chain to catch up with the pod.

Ok, so that was just an excuse to toss in another artsy water abstraction.  But believe me, we were moving at quite a clip.

We did, however, take a few minutes to stop at a rock full of sea lions, located between San Juan and Lopez Islands.

I somehow suspect that not much bothers these big boys!

Then again, I hadn’t seen any orcas yet.  Maybe they’d just be an appetizer for a killer whale.

We then took off to familiar waters - the waters we saw from the south a couple days earlier - in between the islands and the Olympic Peninsula.  Not too long later we joined a group of boats spread out to check out the “J” Pod.  Now, the first time you see fins rise and fall out of the water is truly a humbling site.  It matches seeing elephants in the wild.

For a while there, we had rather poor positioning, photography-wise, looking into the sun.  Still, we managed to see the new J Pod calf with its mother.

One thing about the whale watching boats is they are very careful about respecting regulations regarding how close they can get to the whales.  That's good!  As much as I want to see whales, I don't want to disturb them.  So the boats move, stop and then wait.  And you wind up rocking back and forth while you're waiting.  With luck, the whales come your way.  Barring luck, there is the trusty telephoto lens and the wonders of cropping.  The hard part with a telephoto, is making sure the lens is pointed in the right direction when the action happens.  And when it does, luck rewards the prepared and patient . . .

Now, in case you were wondering, this whale was about as far away as those from the previous shot.  This is a huge crop from an image where the whale looks like a speck when seen full frame.  Still, I got it!  And the whole time we were with the J Pod, there was only one breach!  All of those years of pointing a camera at Brandon, Kid, Devon and Holden, learning patience, waiting for that moment of unique expression before pressing the shutter button paid off!

Of course, along with the killer whales, I had good company!

After a while we moved into a better position ahead of the pod, and it came towards us, giving us wide berth on both sides.  However, this time they were much closer and a few of them went to the side with favorable light, so that’s the direction I pointed the camera.

It was simply amazing to see them do so many different things (thanks to our guide describing the different movements that were going on and what they were for).  It really was impressive to see them gliding effortlessly through the water.

Other than the one breach and a look-around where the whale lifted its upper body out of the water to look around (which I saw, but missed the shot), there’s not a lot of “action.”  I have a lot of photographs of fins and spouting I won’t bore you with.  

If you ever have the chance to see killer whales in the wild, I’d highly encourage you to do so.  But from a boat of course, because they do feed on people-sized animals.