J37 Hy'Shqa breaching
I was shocked to have residents back in today. They left on Saturday, and I was expecting them to take a long absence. Luckily, J pod must have come back in late last night, because there were some way up north in the Strait of Georgia. Even luckier for us, there were some on the west side of San Juan Island. We left Roche Harbor through Mosquito Pass, thinking we were going to head down toward Eagle Point. However, before we got all the way through Mosquito, another boat picked up some more in Open Bay (which is directly outside of Mosquito Pass). We identified these guys as the J14s. After hanging out with those guys for a while, they actually disappeared. Although killer whales can't stay under for longer than 20 minutes at a time, they can definitely cover a lot of ground in those 20 minutes. Instead of searching blindly for this group, we went to look at a humpback that was found just south of us, and traveled with that whale up to roughly the same point that we left those orcas.
On the second trip, we head south and found some more of J pod around Hanna Heights. These, I identified as J27 Blackberry and his sister Tsuchi. Their brother Mako should have been somewhere within a few miles. We then saw some breaching off in the distance, and after catching up with them, realized it was the J14s again. We hung out with them for quite a long time. They displayed a lot of surface activity, and kept everyone on board in awe the whole time.
Naturalist Alex
M/V Sea Hawk