10-26-13 In Ones and In Twos

Saturday, October 26th
...Transients?  Yeah?  Some I haven't ever seen before - sure!
Out with friends to see some Transients, the T46Bs and T46Cs...after many, many days of fog, fog and more fog, it was wonderful to cross Haro Strait and into the sunshine off Victoria and some Transient killer whales...
...two with notches...

...two with obvious scratch marks...

...one little and one large with hardly any scratches at all...

...there should have been 7 whales present in these two groups, but there were only 6...T46B was not there...we'll see where she shows up next time...meanwhile her two year old was being chaperoned by aunt T46C - oops! - correction:  that's T46C3 who was with mom T46C - I learned from Dave at the Center for Whale Research...thanks for the correction! - we weren't going to stay with them long, because we heard there were humpbacks 'all over the place'...and the Residents were out to the west too!  WOW!...
..as we were heading toward the Sooke area, we could see humpbacks in the distance...most of them much closer to shore...we saw one...a bit farther on there were two together...too far at that point for images...
...Nigel was one of the first Residents we saw...

...off in another direction we saw Mako J-39 and Surprise! L-86...

...here's an example of the HBs in the distance...

...then two humpbacks appeared 'out of nowhere'... one looked like he/she was heading straight for J-27...

...a pause to watch some birds get in on the treats...

...and then there were humpbacks and killer whales passing each other where we were and we heard that there were Transients and humpbacks crossing paths several miles to the east of us...
...DoubleStuf J-34 was giving a pec wave off our port side...

...a humpback doing the same thing on the starboard side!

...one of the humpbacks breached a few times...(missed them both)...then one of the killer whale kids breached...[they were not related but fun to think this one had taken a clue from one of the HBs :) ]

...we saw the Residents...representatives of all three pods, but it wasn't a type of encounter where they could all be accounted for...they were like the humpbacks - one here, two over there...some off in the distance...
..as the sun was getting lower - oh, that fall/winter lighting can be fabulous...

...and home we headed...

...it's Chum salmon time of year...and it looks like the whales are finding plenty of it...going to their usual fall places...
...too bad the Fraser River Spring/Summer Chinook runs continue to decline...will there be any attempt to correct this decline or will the people wait until those runs just collapse completely...

What a sad state of affairs.