Friday
...out on Maya's Westside Charters to see the whales... Transients were nearby and not in the fog...
...you'll have to read the Granny's Cove encounter below to know what I'm talking about here...
...in the morning there were Residents off the south west side of the island, but the fog had been pretty thick down there and stayed that way most of the day...
...on the boat in the afternoon, while watching the Transients, one of the passengers commented that she had seen whales in the morning down by Granny's Cove...
Read this 'meant to be encounter' (It's just too special): She told me that even though it was foggy she thought she would take a short hike at American Camp (she's on vacation)...down at Granny's Cove there are some big rock formations and she was trying to capture an image with the those rocks on either side of the frame. As she was about to take the picture a dorsal fin came right into the middle of her frame, so she just began clicking away!...neat!.
...when we got back in from the trip with the Transient killer whales, I asked if she would allow me to see her images, perhaps I could identify a whale or two...lucky for me she was staying at Snug Harbor and had her lap top, and offered to download her images so I could see them better. Okay...what a find! J34, J27 and J26, who are three of the whales in Group B+ who were near Turn Pt. yesterday afternoon and hadn't made up their mind which way they were going. Some others were L25, L41 and L89! Like wow!! there were several other whales in the images - females and juveniles but too difficult to ID with the fog and distance...she sent them on to the Center for Whale Research for proof of presence of at least some who were down island all day long in the fog. Way to go Helena!
Saturday
...another foggy day, oh no!...whales still at the Sand Heads (at the Fraser River), that makes it two nights in a row they stayed up in that area...I guess that's where the salmon are...
...through the thick fog for a short distance and up toward Pt. Roberts, the whales were spread for what appeared to be a couple miles...
...It appeared to be the whales we had gone through Active Pass with two days ago (see 9-12 post), as I was seeing some of them, and it didn't look like there were more than what we had the other day, but I didn't know for sure...
...Granny J-2 was in the lead...
...off in the distance I saw Spieden J-8 and farther off I could see some others, and Shachi J-19, Eclipse J-41, and the K14s were traveling together...we spent our time with them...they went east, then angled south west, back toward the east and boy were they active...
...finally they made it past Patos light heading down...
...a flock of surf scoters - yikes! is it that time of year already?
...it was time to leave, and as we did the sun began shining through the fog...it looked as if thin rays of light were coming up from the water - difficult to capture, yet it was another special encounter, only this time with the sun and the fog...
...8:45 pm (9-14), I am going through images and I began hearing the whales on the hydrophones coming down...
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