Ks, Ls, and an Electrical Storm

On this overcast morning we set off for our first trip on the day on the Western Prince with a charter from the St. Mary's Marine Science School from Australia. We didn't have a whale report when we left the dock, but since the whales headed north last night we figured they would be picked up soon. Sure enough, we were not far from the harbor when we heard there were whales heading south in Rosario Strait.

It was a bit of a foggy morning, and if its not totally socked in I love to see the islands in the fog:

We picked up a small group of whales and as we hung out watching them they seemed indecisive as to which way to go. It sounded like the large group of whales had split and were taking different channels south. The group we were with was just off the north end of Cypress Island, and kept moving back and forth along the shoreline, at one point stopping to play in a kelp bed and surface with fronds draped over their dorsal fins and tails. Finally, they decided to head south down the east side of the island, and that's when we got a close enough look at a few of them to determine that K21 Cappuccino and his sister K40 Raggedy were in the group. Viewing the orcas in Rosario Strait is one of the most beautiful places in the islands to see them:

For this afternoon's public trip we headed south to meet up with the whales again off the west side of Lopez Island. The L2 family group was leading the way, and we saw L2 Grace with her sons L78 Gaia and L88 Wavewalker. Regular blog readers may remember that a couple of Sundays ago we had a close encounter with Wavewalker...well the same thing happened again this Sunday! We were paralleling along side of him when all of a sudden he veered closer and gave us a nice look at his left side:

A little later we were viewing K11 Georgia, who is the oldest female in K-Pod at an estimated age of 76, and L87 Onyx, who spends most of his time with K11 and family since his mother died a few years ago. While we were watching the two of them, Wavewalker snuck up behind us again and this time passed showing us his right side. I just happened to have the camera pointed in the right place at the right time when he appeared and got this cool sequence of shots of him surfacing:

After Wavewalker passed us by, we saw some more of K11's family group, including her son K25 Scoter, her daughter K20 Spock, and her grandson K38 Comet. It's really great to see Spock and Comet traveling with the rest of their pod again, as a month ago was that strange incident where they were the only two resident whales in the area, separate from the rest of their family, which is something I had never seen before.

The other strange thing that happened today is we got caught in an electrical storm. We don't get many thunderstorms out here, but we had some rain and thunder last night with the prediction for potentially more this evening. I can't call what we experienced today a thunderstorm, however, because while it was raining there was no thunder or lightning. The first thing we experienced was one of our passengers getting a strong electric shock from one of the hand rails. Then someone noticed that everyone's hair was standing straight up, like it does with any type of static electricity. When the antenna on top of the boat started buzzing we knew something weird was really going on. Captain Hobbes had us all go either inside or under the cover of the back seating area and turned off all the ship's electronics. Thankfully, it passed within a few minutes and no lightning strikes were seen, but it was a very bizarre (and a little scary) thing to witness!