Orca Trip In the San Juan Islands

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An island during the ferry trip

In celebration of our two year anniversary, I booked a whale watching trip for my girlfriend Raychel and I for last Tuesday. The weather cooperated (big relief), so I was able to shoot all the photographs I wanted to, including on the ferry! All in all, the trip was everything I hoped it'd be, especially my avoidance of seasickness.

If you've never been to the San Juan Islands in Washington - where our whale excursion took place - I highly recommend you make some room in your schedule. Dense and full evergreen trees pack the summits of every small island, while the coast is abundant with windswept growth - all full of character. Every tree is different, too; each its own bare and gnarly trunk, each their own sparse limbs. And if you look hard enough, close enough, you'll spot a perched bald eagle. On occasion, you'll be able to see a harbor seal poking its head up out of the seawater, and in the distance an orca's dorsal fin disappears back in. It epitomizes the Northwest, and that's why I admire the Islands so much!

We took a ferry from Anacortes to Friday Harbor and almost immediately left for our whale watching trip. Even though I love living in Washington, my body is oddly intolerant of cold weather (must be the California in me...), so I ducked behind lovely Raychel while the boat "Oddesey" took us where the orcas were last sighted. Our group of whale watchers were the last to join the party - about five other boats were already there, full of people on the deck. After a couple minutes, we saw what we came to see.

The "saddle patch" is the grey behind the dorsal fin.

Black spires began to shoot up from the surface of the water. Shy, at first - but then relaxed by all of the positive attention. It was a spectacular thing to witness! We had a naturalist aboard the Oddysey and a few employees of the business, and they could actually name which orcas we were seeing. I put on my skeptical expression and was thinking, "Yeah, right...." But here's a fact I was ignorant of: the dorsal fin, and the bit of grey behind it, the "saddle patch", are like a human's fingerprint - all are truly unique and therefore recognizable. Fun fact of the day!

The trip lasted about four hours, plenty of time for me to shoot a memory card full of photos. As soon as I knew it, we were headed back to Friday Harbor to conclude our time with the orcas. We booked our trip with San Juan Excursions, who treated us generously aboard a beautiful boat.

Thinking back on everything we saw that day, one word sits and lingers in my head: conservation. You hear it on the commercials watching TV and see it titling news articles every now and again, but you never think twice. Well,  I've realized that the significance of conservation actually means something when you make a connection with nature, like the way we did. Without conservation efforts, the shine on the orcas' backs wouldn't be from the water, but it'd be from slick oil grossly polluting the ocean they swim in. It's nasty to think about, really, and I don't want anything to obstruct my opportunity to go back and see all that I saw.

Since Raych loves orcas so much (and always has), she decided she would symbolically adopt an orca with a donation to the Whale Museum at Friday Harbor (Instead of orcas, I'm researching adoption programs for wolf conservation. They're my favorite mammal.) The naturalist on the Odyssey explained to us that a lot of the money from the donations is put into ensuring an abundance of salmon - the staple of an orca's diet. To those with an interest in orcas or marine life as a whole, these symbolic adoption programs are a great way to get involved.

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