Saturday, September 5th, 2009

We had a rock and roll start to our day. Bellingham Bay had winds of 20 to 25 mph and it was really lumpy! There were gusts up to 50! As we were getting ready to go, we watched all of the sailboats leaving the harbor for the annual PITCH Regatta Race. When all of the boats assembled out in the bay, they wound up cancelling the race due to high winds. We bucked through the waves and finally came into the middle of the islands, where it was much calmer. Bellingham Bay is a natural wind funnel anyway, so if you add more wind it really gets choppy. (This is another reason we don’t go out all year long, even though we have a large boat that is 110’ long.) Finally the sun started to come out, the seas were calmer, and people ventured out onto the decks. We stopped by Speiden Island and watched some of the Corsican sheep along the shoreline eating kelp. We had never seen them do this before, but we don’t hang out on Speiden all day, either! These sheep were imported for game hunting back in the sixties. The island was renamed Safari Island. The concept didn’t quite cut it out here in the San Juan’s, so the owners packed it up. They left the Sika deer and the Corsican sheep that they imported, and they have managed to thrive. We also saw some of the Sika deer grazing on the hill side. We entered Haro Strait, hearing that there were whales down near the city of Victoria on Vancouver Island. It was still quite a ways to go, and out there in this open water, there were some pretty good swells. It’s also hard to find orcas in these kind of seas in a large body of water. The Island Caper (us) and two other whale watching boats ‘canvassed’ the strait looking for whales. We were all heading in the same direction, yet a few miles apart. If the whales were there, we were going to find them! Finally, a fin! It was J pod. They were heading to the west side of San Juan Island. We followed along (at our respectful distance). There was one juvenile that breached four times in a row. The main activity was fishing, and we watched J1 (Ruffles) fin speeding through the water chasing fish. He’s the oldest male in all three pods at 58 years old, and he’s pretty fast for an old man! We had some great views of J28 (Polaris), a sixteen year old female. Everyone got some great photos.  We were all out on deck now, the seas were calm, the sun was out, and the waves and wind that we had dealt with in the morning were now just a memory. Harbor porpoise and Dall’s porpoise were also sighted. What was really cool; at one point we had harbor porpoise 100 yards off the stern, Dall’s porpoise a 100 yards off our beam, and orcas spread out everywhere! All at the same time! Wow! Our residents orcas are fish eating orcas, so they don’t eat porpoise. We do have transient orcas that come through here and they do eat porpoise, and any other marine mammal that they can find. The marine mammals seem to know the difference between the residents and the transients. On our way home we stopped to look at some harbor seals. Our birding today was spotty due to the weather. Marbled murrelets, common murres, cormorants, Heerman’s gulls, glaucous winged gulls, Bonaparte’s gulls, and turkey vultures.