Wonderful Whale Watching

Point Hudson Harbor at Port Townsend

Our boat - the Olympus

Woke up early this morning and drove back in to Port Townsend and down to the Point Hudson Harbor which was full of tall sailboats and large ocean-going yachts.  We found our boat for the day – The Olympus – and joined the other 11 people for the whale watching tour.  There were two from Germany, two from Minnesota, two from Ohio, two from Arizona, and a French speaking family of three.  The boat had a glassed-in seating area and then an upper deck and a small lower deck in the stern.  It was a four-hour tour – taking us 1 ½ hours to get across the Strait of Juan de Fuco, 1 hour to look for whales, and then the 1 ½ hour return trip to Port Townsend.

Looking back at the north side of the cloud-topped Olympic Mountains

As we were out on the water we could look to the east and see Mt. Baker and Mt. Rainier (just barely).  We could look south and see the Olympic Mountains from a very different perspective than we had been seeing them all week.  On the way across the Strait we passed a gaff-rigged schooner that had four very large sails up.  Our boat stopped moving so everyone could take pictures of this rather unique boat, and so that the sailboat could get by without encountering our wake.

We finally arrived along the south shore of San Juan Island and joined the many other whale watching tour boats that were parked there.  There were small inflatable boats that had come over from Victoria, BC, Canada and that held 14 – 18 people to a very large three deck boat that had come from Seattle.  There were also small private boats.  Our guide was communicating with the other pilots to learn the location of the whales and they all moved along the coast following the whales.  Along the shore was the “whale police”, a boat from the Washington State Fish and Wildlife.  They would give warnings, and could give tickets ($5,000 fines), if boats got closer than 100 feet to the whales, or traveled too fast through the area.

The area along San Juan Island has a resident group of orca whales that has approximately 87 whales in the group.  They are divided up in to three families or pods (J, K, or L).  Families of whales stay together for life.  The researchers have used visual patterns on the dorsal fins to identify the individual whales and have given them names and have collected data on the whales using photographs.  The oldest whale in this pod is a female who is approximately 100 years old.

The orcas swim back and forth along the coastline of the island feeding on salmon.  The large male orcas can eat as much as 350 pounds of salmon per day.  While they are feeding, they are moving relatively slowly.  Even while they are sleeping they are still swimming slowly.  They are able to dive quite deep, but usually stay in the top 20 feet of the water.

Our first contact with an orca was seeing a dorsal fin come up out of the water and then going back down again.  I noticed that you could always hear the noise of them breathing out right before their fin would appear.   With the male orcas, the dorsal fin can get up to 6 feet high.  Sometimes you could also see them slap their tails down and/or you could see the splash of water.  Sometimes they would be in groups of two or three as they would come out of the water.  A few times we were able to actually see them “breach”, their nose and upper bodies would come up out of the water and then they would splash their bodies down on to the water.  Our guide told us that, if you saw them breach once, it would usually happen again, and it did seem to happen that way.

Our boat would stay in one place for awhile and then move to another as the group of whales moved slowly back and forth along the coastline of the island.  All the other boats were doing the same thing, so we had quite a parade of boats.

During the actual whale watching, we were all out on the upper and lower decks.  But on the way back to Port Townsend we all went back to the enclosed deck and ate our picnic lunches and napped.  We swung past Smith’s Island and sand spit which is a national wildlife refuge.  We saw numerous birds, including the large black cormorants.  The have long necks and a very large wingspan.  They would be sitting on land with their wings stretched out to help get them dried off.  Along the rocky shore of the sand spit we saw two mother seals and their very young pups.

Cormorants and a couple of seals with pups

After returning to the harbor, we drove out through the cute little shops of Old Port Townsend and then headed south on Highway 101.  We made a quick stop at Old Fort Townsend State Park which I had thought might be similar to Prickett’s Fort.  However, there was no reconstruction of any fort, but there were many trails through the woods and along the shoreline of Puget Sound.  Down on the rocky shoreline there were many large, whitish clam shells.  Walking along the shoreline was limited because it was high tide.

We continued to follow Highway 101 along the length of Puget Sound until it ended just before Olympia.

Puget Sound, about midway between Port Townsend and Olympia

We are staying tonight in a Motel 6 which is in Centralia, which is just south of Olympia.