EncDate: 13/09/21

EncSeq: 1

Enc#: 72

ObservBegin: 08:44 AM

ObservEnd: 01:34 PM

Vessel: Mike 1

Staff: Mark Malleson

Pods: L

LocationDescr: Everest

Start Latitude: 48 31.5

Start Longitude: 124 49.9

End Latitude: 48 31.7

End Longitude: 124 49.8

 

EncSummary:

Mark departed Gateway Marina out of Port Renfrew at 0700. He took advantage of the morning light and calm seas and headed east towards Sombrio Point and stopped to scan with the hydrophone over the side a couple of miles southwest of Sombrio Point. With nothing heard or seen, he decided to head to the hot spot of the past week, 5 nm southwest of Carmanah Point.
As he got within a few miles from his destination, numerous humpback blows were seen on the horizon, and the birdlife greatly increased.
Mark slowed down as he approached the easternmost humpbacks along with numerous steller sea lions surfing in the swell. At 0844, a small blow caught his attention which put him on high alert, but within a minute, a low profile humpback appeared. His disappointment was short-lived when seconds later, a bull dorsal fin appeared slightly west of the humpback surfing down the swell, and then several more appeared. It was a decent-sized group of killer whales with what looked like at least four bulls along with ~ several more females and juveniles. Secretly Mark hoped that it wasn't the L12 and L54 matrilines that hadn't joined the rest of J clan on their foray into the inside waters of the Salish Sea on September 9th but was happy nonetheless to immediately confirm that it was them and they were still around. He hadn't seen them since September 9th, and that wasn't for lack of effort!
They were moving quickly east, all grouped up, but within a few minutes started to spread out and milled about before swinging back westward.
For the next five hours, they worked their way east, west, south, and north. At one point, he watched what looked like prey sharing, so he moved slowly in behind them with hopes of collecting a fish scale, but nothing was to be seen.
At 1130 he opportunistically photographed the tail flukes of the numerous humpback that were in the area, with some aggregations of close to 10 individuals while keeping an eye out on the behaviour and movement of the L's in the distance.
At 1334 Mark ended the encounter and could see that they didn't have a direction in mind as he wrote in the logbook that they were southwest bound and before he put the book away, they were northbound. They were almost in the exact spot that he had found them five hours earlier.