Olivia Ellman | M/V Kestrel | July 4th, 2025 | 2:00 pm
Our afternoon adventure trip was full of surprises, even as we returned to some of the same whales we had viewed in the morning. Before leaving the harbor, we spotted a harbor seal swimming around, so we knew luck would be on our side once we actually departed. Since we already knew of a few families in our region, we left Friday Harbor and traveled east to where we had last seen whales a few hours previously. We traveled along the ferry route interisland, crossed Rosario Strait, and approached Anacortes. A few boats ahead of us were viewing a group of Bigg’s Killer Whales, and we slowly approached the area and began scanning. Eventually we began seeing a few dorsal fins spread out in the area, and followed them towards Guemes Island. We watched a few travel close to shore while a larger male traveled further offshore, making it easy to once again identify these whales as the T99s! It was great to catch up with them again and see where they had been traveling. We followed the whales as they slowly traveled north along the eastern side of Guemes, and got incredible looks at Barakat as he surfaced closer to us. Just as we were thinking it was time to start heading back and say goodbye to the seemingly sleepy whales, we noticed a number of direction changes and sudden movements. As the family all converged in one area, we got our best surprise when two of them suddenly emerged from the water spyhopping! We commonly see this behavior during or after a hunt, so we were assuming this family had actually been slowly tracking a seal as we had been following along. These behaviors are always exciting to see, and we were glad we were able to stick around to see this happen! We watched the family a bit longer and got to see a few little tail splashes and erratic movements before they continued their travel along Guemes. We took this as our signal to also slowly make our way out of the area, and we had a great ride back along the islands to end our whale filled Fourth of July on the water.