Time Speeds Up

 

Looks like it has been literally almost one year since I last posted anything here, my how time seems to pick up speed the older you get!  For the few of you who read this and enjoy it, my apologies.  As Autumn loses its struggle to keep Winter at bay, I'll be more disciplined in putting some new stories here.

It was a decent summer this year of 2021, much, much, much, much better than the misery that was 2020.  2021 was also a year in which I was fortunate enough to find a very nice boat for sale at a price that I could manage which made it possible to get out and better enjoy the seas around me.  We photographed and named some new whales for us so I'll do a post about them and we ventured north in the boat to a new place for us that had the highlight of Andrea successfully fighting and landing a halibut that measured 75 and a half inches long and weighed somewhere around 225 - 230 pounds!

But, I'll start the first post of 2021 with an encounter we had just 3 days ago on one of the first sunny calm days we have had in nearly a month.  

Andrea and I, as well as Kash, her 10 month old Siberian Husky, went out boating with no real plan other than to enjoy the Sun, take some photos, drink some wine, and hope to see something cool in the way of wildlife or nature.  We decided to go between Wrangell Island and the mainland which isn't usually our preferred destination but we hadn't been that way in a while and I have a tree job to do there soon at a remote cabin so going that way would also give me the chance to see what that job will involve.

Here are a few pictures of the upcoming job.  We have to take out the tall Sitka Spruce  tree to the right of the cabin in these pictures.  The tree is big and leans out over the cabin a bit so we will have to climb it and take it apart in pieces.  This means climbing to close to the top, tying a climbing rope (line) and a lowering line to the tree, rappelling back down and then working my way back up cutting off the branches along the way.  Some of the branches will probably have to be lowered on the lowering line so they don't fall on the cabin and damage the roof or break windows.  Once the branches are all removed and I'm back at the top, the top of the tree will be cut off, topping the tree, and then I'll start working my way back down cutting pieces of the trunk of the tree off as I go.  Yes, it is scary sometimes, but with experience, skill, and extreme focus, it is done safely.

The route we took in the boat after visiting this cabin took us passed a small river called Aaron's Creek which is one of my favorite places in the area.  It is rugged, remote and about as untrammeled by humans as it gets.  It also has some amazing and unnamed mountains lining its valley.

If a person were to climb these mountains it would involve a very long day of extreme bushwacking through an area known for very large brown bears just to get to the base of one of them.  A helicopter would bypass all of that but in my thinking would be cheating.

I won't drag this first post out for too long so I'll get to the highlight of the day.  After nearly circumnavigating Wrangell Island without seeing anything too exciting, I decided to head away from Wrangell to a strait where whales are more likely to be.  When we rounded the point into Chichagof Pass, we immediately saw what looked like a whale spout in the near distance glistening in the sun.

We quickly realized the spouts were not big enough or tall enough to be from Humpbacks so we began to get excited that maybe, just maybe we had found some orcas.  As the unmistakable sight of a black dorsal fin rising out of the water came into view, we knew we were in luck!!  We soon counted 5 orcas travelling in a loosely organized pod that consisted of 3 females and 2 smaller young orcas.  I positioned the boat ahead of them so we could wait for them to pass by and hope that they would pass by close enough to get some good photos.  I have heard or read somewhere that splashing your hand in the water can get orcas to come closer and I had an orca encounter before in which I did that and think that maybe the splashing did work so I did it again.  A few minutes later, one of the orcas swam belly up right under the boat!!  The two young orcas seemed particularly energetic and kept slapping their tails on the water's surface and even breached a couple of times.

I didn't get many good pictures, orcas are harder to photograph than humpbacks (for me anyway) but I did get a slightly blurry photo of a marking on one of them that was good enough quality to use as an identifying mark.  Like the tails of humpback whales, orcas have unique markings near the base of their dorsal fins and on the gray saddle behind the dorsal fin.  This is how individuals are recognized by humans.  I have another photo of an orca from several years ago that has a white mark at the base of its dorsal fin that looks a lot like the shape of the state of West Virginia.

This orca was matched in the database that I submit my photos to and has been named Peaches by the person who has a previous sighting, an unfortunate name for such an incredible creature  I think we will call her Firefly because the mark reminds me of the ship from the sci-fi show of the same name. This identification also made it possible for me to find out that these are what are known as transient orcas.  I won't get into the details of what transient orcas are but it basically means they travel over big areas and are eaters of marine mammals like seals and sea lions not fish.  Transient orcas are also known as Biggs orcas after a biologist who was a pioneer of orca research (and because it seems like humans have to stick the name of someone who supposedly "discovered" something in nature that has existed and been known about by some for centuries).  We stayed with this group for about an hour enjoying their communications, the young ones energy, and just being in their presence before they swam out into more open water where it would be hard to anticipate where they would go making it hard to keep up with them in the boat.

That's enough mediocre photos.  On to the really cool stuff!

I keep an inexpensive hydrophone and even more inexpensive speaker in the boat for encounters just like this.  It makes a magical experience even more so.

In that video, I am fairly certain that the orca was right under the boat making those sounds because the hydrophone got pulled enough to knock over the speaker.

If you enjoyed those videos, go back to June 2019 in this blog and find the post titled Whale Language.  There are more recordings with the hydrophone from a different orca encounter while kayaking not far from where this one happened.