Sunday July 18th - Js with a big group of surprise Ls

I'm still without internet at home, so my posts continue to be delayed. I'll get photos up from Wednesday's trip as soon as possible - hopefully tomorrow!

On Sunday when we headed out in the morning aboard the Western Prince, we expected to find J-Pod, who we had been seeing a lot of lately. When we got up into Boundary Pass we were surprised to see many more whales, and it turned out most of L-Pod was also present!

The first whales we saw were J17 Princess Angeline and her calf J44

L53 Lulu and her mom L7 Canuck, who had been traveling with J-Pod, were socializing with some of their fellow L-Pod members. Here they are following behind L72 Racer:

The whales were in several large social groups and did some playing around at the surface, including this spyhop:

I was also happy to see L84 Nyssa, who I hadn’t seen yet this year. He was traveling near his closest living relative, L5 Tanya, and their whole family group has been pretty scarce this year.

In the afternoon we met up with the same whales further south where they were spread out over several miles. The group we spent most of our time viewing was an interesting combination of J and L-Pod whales. From J-Pod we saw J1 Ruffles, J2 Granny, J8 Spieden, and J26 Mike, who were traveling with L54 Ino and her two sons L100 Indigo and L108 Coho as well as L26 Baba and her offspring L90 Ballena and L92 Crewser. Here is L54 Ino giving a tail slap with four year-old L108 Coho just behind her:

The male in this photo is J26 Mike, and the female behind him is 77 year-old J8 Spieden:

We also got several great looks at Ruffles. In this photo you can really see how he got his name with that wavy fin:

The whales were so spread out that we ran into several other groups as we were making our way slowly back towards Friday Harbor, and at one point we stopped to get a great look at L82 Kasatka. We could see another whale swimming upside down underneath her, but it never surfaced nearby so we couldn’t see who she was traveling with.