My summer is half over (sad face). BUT I did have some friends come out to visit for a whole week, so I took advantage of the opportunity to do everything touristy that I wanted to do but wouldn't do by myself.
My friends really wanted to go whale watching and it's been on my list of to-dos out here, so once they got off the plane, we ate dinner and went to bed so that we could wake up super early and hit the road towards Anacortes, Washington and go on a whale watching excursion.
Since our boat was leaving from Anacortes, we had to get up bright and early to beat traffic out of town and make sure we made it to the boat dock in time for loading and leaving. Our boat left at 9:30am on a 5-6 hour journey through the San Juan Islands in the Puget Sound.
{Side note- pictures from this entire week are from both of our cameras and a GoPro, and we both played with settings the entire time, so they don't look consistent by any means. Plus I cropped a few so that it was easier to see what we were attempting to photograph. Half photo cred does go to my friends and half does go to moi}
It was... cold. They told us to dress warmly, but I kind of expected it to warm up as the day went on. However, that did not happen. We started out on a brisk little ride on a cloudy morning.
Our boat had food and drinks as well as indoor and outdoor seating, but obviously I choose outdoor seating on the upper deck. I'm not going to sit inside a boat and watch whales!
Our "job" was to scan the waters for dorsal fins. We all kind of agreed that was just a ploy to get us all feeling involved in the search, but it worked for the time being and a little ride on the water isn't a bad morning anyway.
We toured in between the San Juans for a few hours without seeing any whales. However, we did see a bald eagle nest and a few seals scattered about the island banks.
Our boat captain was sure to remind everyone that this was not a zoo or any trained animals and that our job was to see animals in their habitats and in the wild and there is no guarantee that we would see anything while we were out and about that day. Noted. So the whole time in the back of your head you're thinking "gosh I hope we actually get to see one". But since doing my research (after the experience, per usual) I learned that orca whales in particular really stick to the same area or routine, so it's not super difficult to locate them. However, our tour company and the others were all communicating to locate and share the experience. Plus I think with orcas being on an endangered list in our area, there are lots of rules about how these companies can go about navigating the area.
But anyways, what he meant was that for a good few hours it was just us staring at water (I mean, the views aren't terrible...) and our naturalist pointing out birds.
Once we got to our prime viewing area, things really picked up. We had a few resident (for sure) and transient (I think?) orca whales swimming around. Then we really did have to search for dorsal fins in the water.
At this point, the captain and our naturalist tell everyone which side of the boat will be best for viewing and everyone moves back and forth for awhile as we follow the whales around or continue searching for more. We got to test our sea legs running around with cameras in hand.
Here's a little behind the scenes picture of me taking a picture of them; this is probably what I look like most of the time on these adventures...
So we located some dorsal fins. We ran around a boat on the Puget Sound watching them swim around. And every once in awhile we got lucky and the orcas got going so fast that they propelled out of the water and the entire boat would gasp and "ooohhhhh!" at once.
Our naturalist seemed to know these orcas well, he had names for them and gave us all kinds of fun facts about resident whales as we scanned the water.
Walking around on the boat was really taking a nice risk of falling over or falling down stairs. It was amusing for some of us...
Once we were out of prime whale viewing sea, we took a (still very chilly) ride back around the other side of the islands and back towards the Washington coast.
In the end, we got to see a bunch of orca whales and other wildlife, had some quality time on the ocean water with good friends, and our week of vacation (vacation for them, staycation for me) was off to a great start.
After this adventure we were starving, so we hit up a local brewery happy hour, ate all their appetizers and had a few drinks before heading off on our next adventure in Washington (it was only 3:00 in the afternoon after all!).
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