2-25-16 J Pod Showed Up!

Thursday, February 25th
...I have these river otters to thank or I might have missed the whales...

...a few years ago there was a river otter who had her pups under the house...ugh...I tried all the things they said to do to get rid of them, but to no avail...
...for some unknown reason this year I found myself saying,"if the river otters show up I'm not going through what I did before."...a few days later I heard them, so I investigated and there were two littte ones looking back at me...oh, brother!
...I politely asked them to leave and by that afternoon they were gone...only for a couple days...and on it went...
...at about 9:00 a.m. yesterday, I happened to look out the window as 8 - yes, 8 - river otters approached the shore, looking as if they were coming to 'their' place under 'my' place...out the door I went and called to them...they stopped in their tracks and just watched me!...they eventually left, possibly because they saw that I wasn't letting them out of my sight!

...so today, I was about to go to town at about 8:30 when I thought I ought to wait a bit to see if the river otters showed up again...
...and about 15 minutes later one brief strange sound comes over the Lime Kiln hydrophones and then two calls that are J Pod calls!!...tying my shores and calling Dave of the Center for Whale Research to let him know, excitedly, that J Pod was here!...where?...in Haro Strait but that's all I knew at the moment...and out the door to Lime Kiln to see if I could find them...
...I spotted one male a mile or two offshore to the north...
...I heard someone call out there's one and saw that she was pointing way off shore and a bit to the south of the lighthouse...I saw several whales spread out, most a couple miles from shore...it looked as if they were coming from Discovery Island and heading north...I saw some of the J19s, and the J14s and many others who were too far off at the time...

...it wasn't long before I found myself out on Legacy with Jeff and with Andy...
...J Pod was spread all across the strait...

...some of them eventually moved in shore toward some of the J14s...

...next thing I see is Notch and Suttles J-40 foraging...

 ...Suttles J-40...

...it was a few hours later when we located Granny J-2 and Onyx L-87, traveling together way over on the west side of Haro Strait...

...when the whales reached Turn Pt. most of them made their way up Swanson Channel, to the northwest...
...Princess Angeline J-17, baby J-53 and Moby J-44 had a different idea...they moved up Boundary Pass a short distance going northeast...then they changed their direction for about 10 minutes and changed it again for about 10 minutes...and repeated that for quite a while..

...they were a few miles behind the rest of the whales and as we were leaving they were heading in their direction...

..so many images this encounter...that's what happens when it's been so very long since seeing J Pod :)...enjoy...