2012 June 29 | The Captain's Whale Blog!

J and L pods feeding and forging, playing with their food

Today has proven to be a pretty good day so far our 10am trip left the harbour with no whale information, but we made our way into Oak Bay with yes positive confirmation of whales at Turn Point just off Stewart Island heading south was very good info to hear. It was music to our ears, not sure at that point if they were transients or residents, we briefed the passengers at that time in Oak Bay by the Victoria Golf Club, the second oldest golf course in North America and we were making our way through Oak Bay when I spotted a boat our into the distance and out of curiosity I went over there and found a transient killer whale. Turned out to be a female T-2b and she has broken off from her family about a couple of years ago, normally seen traveling with the T-60′s but this is a kind of a rare sighting to see her by herself but it was a pleasant surprise. We followed her through the Chain Islets she was on the prowl looking for some seals at least appeared to be. Then we followed her out a about a mile or so out into the open water nice parallel viewing sequence with a couple of nice surfacing sightings of a transient killer whale. Which was a total bonus. We made our way back into the Chain Islands where we engaged lots of harbour seals, harlequin ducks, pigeon guillemots, common muir, double crested cormorants, then left that particular area and headed towards Kellett Bluff, the northern tip of San Juan Island, Washington State. Here we had half of J-pod and a handful of L-pod. L-87 (Onyx) L-72 (Racer) and L-92 (Cruiser). Excellent viewing animals traveling quite quickly in a southerly direction they were motivated. We over a period of time saw them spread out into a radical feeding and forging pattern. There were a couple of little breaches, some nose pokes out of the water. But pretty steady behaviour we ended up finishing off with a nice visual of L-87 (Onyx) who I believe is 19-20 years old and he was chasing a fish and surprised us all as we were paralleling him at about 200 meters and he came relatively close to our general vicinity chasing a fish which seemed like an eternity but I am sure it was only a couple of minutes. He definitely was playing with his food it was quite an enjoyable experience. Nice finale for the customers and guests and then we made our way home