[caption id="attachment_1658" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="K25 Scoter breaching"]
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This afternoon, Captain Pete and I motored north on M/V Sea Hawk with 18 guests on board toward a report of southern resident killer whales. Not far from Blunden, we picked up the K13s, a group of 7. It started out as a pretty standard encounter--grouped up animals surfacing intermittently, and guests were thrilled. Then, as if a switch had been flipped, they began breaching! Breach, after spyhop, after double breach, after breach. It was like they had woken up, and then we noticed why.
K13s surfing in the wake of a container ship
Not far in the distance and approaching very quickly, a container ship was headed straight for the whales. Being that it takes so long for huge ships like these to slow down to change course, it is up to the whales to avoid them. But these guys weren't going to. Guests suddenly began to worry that the whales were about to be hit. I reassured them,"Just wait," I said, with a pretty good idea of what we were about to witness.
I was right. Not a minute later, the whales were swallowed by the 6 foot wake of the freighter. They immediately began surfing. Mostly what we could see at the surface was just the tips of their dorsal fin breaking the surface for extended periods of time, and hitting speeds of 20 mph. Every now and then, a whale or two would break free of a wave, porpoising forward, and catching the next one.
There are two ways that we can interpret this behavior.
1. By riding the wake from the freighter, just like when other dolphins and porpoises bow ride, they were getting a push forward, and were covering more ground with less effort. This makes sense because residents are fairly predictable in their movements. Just as I had suspected, they were heading west in Boundary past, and continued south in to Haro Strait around Turn Point, which was exactly the direction that the ship was heading.
2. They were having fun.
Either way, we certainly had fun watching them.
Naturalist Alex
M/V Sea Hawk