Trifecta...

Whales, not horse racing.

I keep thinking I'll take some time off from the blog, but the events keep on happening.  We had a private charter today; they requested a Spanish speaking naturalist... naturalist Erick did a great job for our guests today (he is quite fluent).  I faked my way through enough Spanglish to get the point across for the safety talk, and we headed out.  On schedule, but after the other Friday Harbor boats went out.

I had options: resident Orcas, J and L Pod moving north from San Juan Island, around Battleship Island.  Plenty of whales, but I figured there'd also be plenty of boats there.  Second option: some of K-Pod on the southwest side of the island.  Third option: transient Orcas moving north in Swanson Channel.  I decided to go for option 2, knowing that I could give Erick some other stuff to talk about on the way there and back.

It was lumpy in Haro Strait.  Back into "mechanical bull" mode at the helm of this boat.  There were about 8 whales, in groups of 2 or 3, but very few boats.  In order to keep the boat from rockin' and rollin', I kept the bow in to the waves, and the stern facing the whales... good viewing for the guests, a bit hard on my neck.

The folks on the boat were doing fine.  The viewing was good...

When I was about to say "last looks," I got a call from another boat, asking about the situation where we were... found out they were looking at a humpback about 15 minutes south of us.  "Wanna trade?"  Erick let the guests know that we were going to head out to see if we could find the humpback.  Along the way, we saw a Minke whale and some harbor porpoise... I didn't stop, though - if I was going to stay on schedule, I needed to get to where the humpback was last seen.

Right on schedule...

The water had flattened out a bunch... easy to have the boat shut off to see and hear the humpback.  It was doing 4 or 5 good surfacings, then going on a 4 minute deep dive.  During the deep dive, we saw another Minke about 100 yards away!  Then, another.

Trifecta!  Orca, humpback, Minke!  No, I didn't get a photo of the Minkies... my job is driving the boat and pointing out the activity.  Time to head back to Friday Harbor.  Erick asked if we could see if there were any Stellar Sea Lions on the rocks on the way through Cattle Pass... yep...

That is a big boy half in the water.  The current was ripping through Cattle Pass on the flood tide; reasonably easy to keep the boat in position, working with the current.  Heading back to Friday Harbor, we were going 7 knots faster than we had on the way out, running with instead of against the current.

Back to our slip, fueled, and cleaned... in time to ride home with my Honey.

Turned out to be a fine day with the whales.  All three species.  ;-)