1-8-12 What Was I Thinking - No Whales - HA!

Sunday, January 8th...second post of the day...

earlier I posted 'no whales'...etc....

...it was a while later that Capt. Jim of Maya's Westside Charters calls and all I can hear is garble, garble garble (cell phones- ugh!), "are you coming?" ...well that had to be about whales...

...on my way to the harbor I hear from Kim that transients are after a Steller sea lion in Spieden Channel...oh, my, we had to hurry...

...Dave of the Center for Whale Research met us and off we went...

...Spieden Channel is becoming a regular location for spotting transients...then again I wonder if maybe it's 'the spotters,' Kim and Karl, who are just always looking...Lonesome Cove, this afternoon was certainly the place to be to see transients tangle with a Steller sea lion...

...as we arrived on scene the transients were still after the Steller...tail flukes belong to T75B...that Steller is looking in our direction, but we were way far away from him......these splashes belong to T68, going after that Steller......here's T68...she has a great notch and a lumpy dorsal fin......her boy is T68A...he has a kinky fin...making his dorsal fin look different from different angles......lots of Stellers were hauled out at Green Pt......the whales must have had the Steller 'on the bottom' or somewhere because it wasn't floating, and it took quite a while before any gulls showed up...two got there first... ...and then the rest...well, you know how gulls can be!...T68A, two gulls and two Mouflon rams......guess these two were after scraps from the big boy......the whales would move about slowly for a while and then go down again for several minutes...sometimes surfacing together...T75B, T68A and T68 on the far side......from left T68, T75B and T75B1......we left them still feeding on their meal...

...when I got home I checked on the California sea lion...he was still in the same place he was at 10:30 this morning (see previous post)...makes me wonder if those Ts had been in the neighborhood and this CA sea lion got 'wind' of them and decided on 'Plan B' for his day...