Welcome to the Whale-derness: These Sightings Were Not Just Flukes!

As the San Juan Islands are known for whales, whale-watching is one of the best ways to enjoy the natural beauty of these islands! The islands have several different species of whales, like minke whales, humpbacks, and orcas! We used a company called Maya’s Legacy Whale Watching, and the boats were super fast, making you more likely to see whales and more likely to have fun even without the whales! Overall, I think this company was really good for fun, exploration, and learning about wildlife in general.

My favorite spot on the boat was the front deck. From there, you can see out in 3 of 4 directions. The front is also really fun, for me at least. I love it when you go over a wave and the boat bounces, and on the second day, there was a lot of this. The water outside of Cattle Point (a lighthouse near the southern tip of San Juan Island) was turbulent, and that was fun to bounce on. We met a person on the front deck that also loved sailing through turbulent waters, and I know we both definitely loved it! As we were passing through this area, a rhinoceros auklet flew by, and me and Mom got super excited. The woman out front with us noticed how happy we were, and assumed that she was missing a whale sighting somehow. I explained to her that she wasn’t missing a whale, but we had spotted a bird that was on my bucket list for our trip to these islands.

The seabirds of the San Juan Islands are both impressive and adorable, and boy am I glad that we we saw a ton of them. We saw many different species, including tufted puffins, rhinoceros auklets, red phalaropes, common murres, and pigeon guillemots. Pigeon guillemots really know how to make you laugh with their complete and utter lack of grace when landing, making them very entertaining to watch! They are like little potatoes with feet, and are just what you would expect from a flying potato, they are clumsy and can only land by literally crashing face-first into the water. This makes them the comedians of the bird world, and this comedy show can be observed all around these islands (no tickets required for this show)! We only saw rhinoceros auklets a few times, but they are chubby little seabirds with a horn that stick up from their beaks, which gives them a comical appearance. If you want to talk about other cute seabirds, there were tufted puffins, too! As we learned, puffins are really shy, so it was a real struggle to get photos of them. Whenever I pointed my camera at them, they seemed to duck under, like they were trying to annoy me. Their cuteness, however, is enough to pardon them for almost anything they do. And I almost forgot the red phalaropes; little seabirds that have tubelike beaks and feed by spinning and creating vortexes underneath them to concentrate their food. Another bird we saw is the common murre, and they are really impressive. They are small black and white seabirds, and I am sorry I did not get a picture of them. Every time we saw one it dove under, but, unlike the puffins, they stayed under until we were long gone. Their diving is their most incredible trait, they usually dive to depths of about 100 feet, but they have been recorded at about 550 feet underwater. That is a really impressive dive, and this incredible talent definitely makes up for their inability to be a good photography subject.

A fair amount of the other wildlife we saw were seals and bald eagles! The seals congregate on the rocks at low tide to refuel, then they wait for high tide to dump them back into the water to dive down and catch fish again. We saw these guys everywhere, but they were mostly on the rocks or in the water transporting their pups from island to island. A funny thing we found with the seals was a kelp flat where they popped up. The funny part about this was that every time I tried to photograph one, it would duck under and another one would resurface elsewhere, so it was like playing whack-a-mole with a camera! The guides showed us one particular seal that had a strange biological condition. His name was Harry, and, ironically, he was hairless. There were other sea mammals too, including Steller’s sea lions! Unlike the seals, these guys were less cute, but what they missed in cuteness, they made up for in their stellar size! The adult males of this species can be 2,500 pounds, and adult females can be up to 800 pounds. Males can be up to 11 feet long, and females can be from 7.5 to 9.5 feet long. They are, not surprisingly, the largest of the eared seal family. If you are interested in other amazing wildlife, bald eagles definitely fit the bill. I will tell you that there were so many of them you would think they were pigeons or something! I hadn’t seen many of them in my life, so this was a real treat! We even saw a young one that had just left the nest! These animals are generally not what most people go whale-watching for, but they are extremely spectacular.

I know I have been talking about everything but the whales, so I will get back to the subject at hand. Our first humpback sighting was Splitfluke and her calf, Valiant. We saw them as we came back into the harbor on the first day, and they gave us a grand total of one tail showing before they moved on to quick dives and breaths. On the second day, we saw Yogi on our trip towards Canadian waters, and Yogi happened to be going in the same direction we were, so we followed Yogi for a little while before jetting off to see the orcas. The reason we know what whales they were was because their tails have specific patterns, meaning you could be like, oh, that whale has an M-shaped mark on their tail, looks like we found Miranda! We actually learned that the humpbacks in the area have a long record of being very helpful to smaller mammals. They have been known to get in the way of orcas hunting smaller sea mammals and help them escape!

The thing the islands are most famous for are the orcas. I was feeling like I wouldn’t see orcas on our trips, but we saw them eventually. We only saw one group of orcas on our whale-watching trips, but boy did they give us a show! We saw Wake, a very famous transient orca; the guide identified her via her distinct identifying marks, 2 notches at the top and bottom of her dorsal fin. One of her kids, Strider, has a dorsal fin with two large notable nicks near the top, and a curved fin tip. Thor, another one of Wake’s kids that we saw, had a nick just over halfway down his fin. Wake had two more kids, and we saw them both too! Centeki is her oldest offspring, but I do not know what identifying marks he has. The same goes for Loki, her youngest child. This orca family didn’t just swim alongside our boat, they jumped everywhere! There were so many of them that I had no way of knowing which one to look at! They were ginormous, as one would expect of these magnificent mammals. They have a sort of intimidating grace to them, as they seem so streamlined; hinting at the efficient predators they are underwater. One of them showed off this grace by doing a huge jump, fully clearing the water, spinning its body into a crescent, and slamming down so close I was surprised I wasn’t splashed in the face by the landing. The whales fooled around for a while, splashing one another in the face with their tails and diving dramatically, but gave up afterwards and went underwater to get food. When the whales leapt out of the water, my heart soared with them. This experience is the true spirit of life on the islands.