Olivia Ellman | M/V Kestrel | Friday August 8th 2025 | 10:00 am
This morning was already very exciting as we left the dock knowing there were some iconic whales not too far away up San Juan Channel. We’ve seen the T18s over the last couple days, including yesterday when they were traveling with another family. Today it was just the three of them, and once we neared President’s Channel we easily began to see the tall dorsal fins of the two boys traveling a bit behind their mom. While I’m always impressed by their size, it’s also incredible to see this family year after year returning to the area and continuing to thrive. T18 herself has not been seen with them for some time, but her daughter T19 is an amazing example of a killer whale mom still in her prime at around 60 years old with her sons (Galiano age 30 and Spouter age 24) still close to her side. We watched these whales travel up the channel, heading towards White Rock where we hoped they might be going to search for some harbor seals. While they still traveled a bit spread out, with the boys close together and mom separate, they all slowly made their way to the rocks and all split up eventually. The direction changes and movements at the surface proved that our hopes were coming true, and we watched these whales prowl along the shorelines. We could see many harbor seals on the shore, and could only assume that one (or multiple) of them were in the process of being killed. It’s always incredible to see how efficient and stealthy these whales are above the surface; as much as I hope for somewhat of a gory show, we typically just see changes in behavior at the surface and then we assume the hunt is over when they continue traveling. This trio was definitely taking their time along the island, and at one point they began surfacing further away heading south. Every time we thought we would begin to leave the area, the group would change behavior again and keep us on our toes so we continued watching them to see what would happen next. Spouter seemed to be doing his own hunt on one side of the rock while the other two appeared close to the shoreline traveling back and forth. We sat and watched them circle White Rock for some time, taking in everything about these whales. Even though we didn’t get to see any specific seal predation above the surface, it was still an incredible time watching them show off their skills. Eventually, it was time to begin to leave the T18s behind and search for other wildlife.
We traveled south in San Juan Channel, scanning along the coastlines and in the channel and saw a few harbor porpoise and then tons of pink salmon jumping out of the water! We stopped for a few minutes to watch the fish jump all around us, something that Captain Brian and I hadn’t seen in this channel before. After this surprise encounter, we continued towards Cattle Pass and went to Whale Rocks to look at all of the Stellar’s Sea Lions still hanging out here. One individual was in the water thrashing around trying to eat a salmon! We also saw a harbor seal swimming by, and then saw many more hauled out on shore as we traveled closer to Lopez and through the narrower “lazy river” section. Soon enough it was time to pick up speed and get back to Friday Harbor. This morning was such a fun adventure getting to see so much wildlife within San Juan Channel, and especially getting to spend so much time with such iconic members of our Bigg’s Killer Whale population.