We had a successful opening weekend for our gray whale season. On day one, Friday March 3, started out with a bang as we managed an orca/gray whale double header! It was a group effort for sure starting with a lucky sighting from the dock 45 minutes before we departed. Captain Trevor was in the wheelhouse and pulled out the binoculars for a quick pre-trip scan and – Bingo – he spotted orcas a mile offshore from Edmonds within 5 seconds. High fives were going around everywhere with the crew, but then we didn’t see them surface again before we had to bring passengers onboard. Whales can move around a lot in 45 minutes so we enlisted the the help of one of our crew members, Colleen, on her day off to give us some help from shore. She just happened to be walking her dog, Peach, on the beach near Point no Point. At first she didn’t see anything but it wasn’t long before she gave us a call back with some black and whites in her sights. It turned out to be the T36B pod and we got some great looks at them before heading north to find a gray whale too.
Besides the orcas we saw 3 of our Sounder gray whales this weekend including 2022 newbie CRC 2440 who never migrated southward this winter, CRC 53 (Little Patch) who arrived way back in December of 2022, and CRC 22 Earhart who has been coming back to Puget Sound ever since 1990. We are looking forward to the return of the rest of the Sounders as March rolls along. Enjoy some photos from this weekend. Photographer/ Naturalist Bart Rulon
