Gray Whale Off Whidbey Island

Today I went out as a passenger on the Western Explorer. The whale-watch company I work for, Western Prince, has added the Explorer as a new vessel this year, and I went out for a pleasure cruise to experience the new ride. It's a rigid-hulled inflatable (zodiac), so it's a zippy, open-air ride that's a lot different from our other boat, but it's a lot of fun.

The orcas headed out to the ocean on Monday night, so instead of checking out orcas today we headed south towards Whidbey Island to look for a gray whale that's been hanging out there. On the way, we headed through Cattle Pass at the south end of San Juan Island and I shot this photo of Cattle Point Lighthouse as a sail boat was passing by:

We caught up with the gray whale and had an amazing encounter with it. It didn't seem to take heed of our presence and we watched it feed in a shallow bay (about 18 feet deep - the whale was as much as 45 feet long!). Gray whales are bottom feeders, meaning that they scoop up mouths full of mud and sift out amphipods to eat. We could tell it was feeding because every once and a while we would see a plume of mud surrounding it as it surfaced.

Interestingly enough, the whale was hanging out right off the Whidbey Island Naval Air Station, and there were several jets doing touch-and-gos and flying overhead, making for a very noisy backdrop to watching the whale!

It was still quiet enough on occasion to hear the whale breath, a much longer exhalation than what we hear from the orcas. With all the blotches and barnacles on its skin, it looks almost more like a rock in my photo than a whale!

But if you look closely in the photo below, you can see the gray whale's two blowholes. Toothed whales, like orcas, have a single blowhole, while baleen whales like the gray have two, looking more like the two nostrils of land mammals that were the precursor to cetacean's blowholes. As always, you can click on the image to see a larger version.

Take a look at all the pock marks and scrapes on the skin! So much different than the smooth, usually unblemished skin of the orca. The gray whale's back really seems to tell a story, and I wonder where it got some of its markings.

We thought our trip was almost over just outside of Friday Harbor, but we came upon a California sea lion hanigng out on the buoy in the middle of San Juan Channel. The Steller sea lions seem to have mostly departed the area in favor of their breeding grounds, but we see the occasional California sea lion year round.