spacon bits

Well, watching and photographing really. I’ve wanted to see the Southern Resident Orca pods since I was a kid and if you can believe it, I passed up the opportunity to try five times in high school (mostly because I never thought I was in good enough shape to handle the extra 25 mile bike ride out to the cliffs on the southwestern side of the island). I did have the notion to charter a sail boat and spend a whole weekend out on the water hoping for the best, but when a coworker offered me the chance to join him out on his kayaks I couldn’t pass that up!

Not 20 minutes out on the water, just after getting past the edge of the cove he asked me how I felt our chances were on seeing whales that day and I looked up and replied “well, there’s a fin right there!” We quickly got my camera out of the dry bag and I began trying to figure out the best way to capture these beautiful, powerful and graceful mammals. They were still several hundred meters away out in the straits and passing by us toward the north end of the island, so by the time you could hear them they were half-way back under the water. No time to wait for auto-focus, vibration control and metering. I just had to set the focus manually and keep the VR floating all the time. The metering alone really wasn’t a problem, so after getting fins and rear dorsals from several whales and watching them fade into the distance, I was starting to catch them early in their breach as this pair above.

I am far from sad to say that I did not quite get what I considered the holy grail of shots; the full breach. I think the reward of seeing these wild  mammals feeding all morning and afternoon was quite enough for one visit. To think I have lived in the northwest nearly all my life and only now taken the chance to see what all the fuss was about–what a shame!