Monday, October 8

We travelled East towards San Juan Island and came across resident Orcas just off the South of the Island. We were passed by a few individuals from L-pod who were fairly spread out, and they were followed by a tightly packed J-pod who appeared to be in a resting phase, their form of "sleeping". Ruffles was obvious in the centre of the pack with his wavy fin. Individuals from K-pod were also identified as being in the area and we realised we had a super-pod, where all of the whales from the 3 resident pods J, K and L are together. We started to see some spy-hopping from the whales at the front of J-pod, and then others in the pod began to tail slap, all signs that the group were beginning to come out of their resting phase. The whales that had passed us first also began to tail slap in reply, and the tightly packed resting group began to split a little with a few changing direction. Then all the whales turned and began to swim back towards San Juan, still with plenty of action above the surface, and before we had to leave the group we observed a number of breaches, with the whale throwing itself right out of the water. We turned in to Chain Islands on the way back to Victoria to see the Cormorants and Harbour Seals, and before we headed back to harbour we heard there were humpbacks not far away. We turned South of Victoria and came across 3 pairs of Humpbacks around the boat. We watched the nearest couple for a few surfaces, then saw the tail flukes before their longer dive. We stayed just for one more round of surfacing and the tail flukes rising before it really was the end of our afternoon of whale watching.