July 17th, 2022

A chilly mid July morning, we had a report of whales in the San Juans, so that’s where we headed.

We found them, traveling, nothing too exciting. We left them, found some more wildlife on Whale Rocks, some lunge feeding Minke whales south of the San Juans.

Then the surprise

Meet T49A2, “Jude”, and T65A3 “Amira”.

These two large males surprised us with amazing behaviors, taking down a harbor porpoise.

Don’t scroll on if you don’t want to see a harbor porpoise being thrown around

Okay, you’ve been warned… Here we go

These are transient, or “Bigg’s” killer whales. They are mammal eating and eat around 500lbs of food a day. A harbor porpoise is about 120lbs so they’d need a few of them, or a mix of different animals that you can find in the Salish Sea.

These two males continued enjoying their meal, breaching, tail slapping and swimming upside down

We watched these boys for a solid ~20 minutes, waiting later then we should have hoping another member of the Pacific Whale Watching Association would find them and stay with them for our afternoon tour.

But no one else found them

So instead we switched directions on our afternoon tour, found 2 members of the T77’s and some wildlife at Protection Island including a tufted puffin and a bald eagle. Jude and Amira were found the next morning North of the San Juan’s.

While you never know when you’re going to get that “National Geographic Moment”, this was a lucky day for us. A bit south-west of Smith and Minor islands we happened upon these whales, we and a private yacht were the only ones there enjoying the view.