Port of Friday Harbor Turns 60 -Party

We had a small group today. Only 3 families and it felt like a private charter. I love our small groups even when the days are gray because I can connect to everyone and give people individualized attention. One family from Seattle had two adorable and well behaved girls.

We traveled north, past Speiden Island to Stuart Island. We timidly stuck our nose into Haro Strait along the west side of San Juan Island because we'd heard that the waves were building. They were so large off the west side, the whale watching boats from Victoria had to turn around and go home. Now that I'm back in the office, the winds are rapidly picking up.

One of the families on the tour just bought their first sailboat and are eagerly learning how to sail. The father's first question to me was about currents. He stated his nervousness about sailing in them. It was amazing timing too because right after he asked, before I could even explain it to him, Captain Craig slowed down the boat to let the passengers feel what it was like to drift with them.

In the San Juans on a flood current, millions of gallons of water flood in from the open ocean, through the islands, and into the Strait of Georgia. On an ebb tide, millions of gallons of water ebb from the Strait of Georgia into the open Pacific. I like to describe the area as a giant toilet bowl that flushes 4 times a day.The currents here run in ebbs and flows and are measured in knots. There are usually two ebbs a day and two floods a day. The movement is horizontal like a river, which is why its measured in speed. The currents create the tide, as when millions of gallons of water flood in, the waterline rises and when millions of gallons of water ebb out, it lowers.

Orca Whales and Wildlife Are Our Only Business. ©

Come Celebrate the Port of Friday Harbor's 60th Anniversary!

View more information about this flyer at: http://portfridayharbor.org/events/spring-splash-april-27-april-28-and-may-2/

This Spring Splash Event is in Celebration of the Port of Friday Harbor's 60th anniversary!!!
If you are in Friday Harbor, hop on down to the Spring Street Landing and have a great time!
Feel free to stop by the San Juan Safaris office as well, we will be open Tuesday April 27th and Wednesday April 28th until 8 p.m.!

Orca Whales and Wildlife Are Our Only Business. ©

Of Wind and Waves

Hello intrepid adventurers! As you know, some days are good, some days are bad and some are hard to define. Is it automatically a bad day if there are no orcas? What if there are whales or eagles or porpoises or just really lovely weather? What if you miss the ferry that you really wanted to be on, but you now get to explore the town of Friday Harbor and have dinner overlooking the water? There are many subtle shades of grey that make of the content of a day and therefore define it as good or bad. A bad day for one person may be a day of dreams for another. Is the day defined by the expectations or the magic that was discovered?

So, where am I headed with this introverted and philosophical dissection of the 24 hour period? To me, and the rest of the crew of the M/V Sea Lion, any day on the water is a good day. But unfortunately this day was sans orcas or Steller's sea lions or whales. We had a lovely look at two harbor porpoises, a rare treat indeed since these animals are so shy. We also got to see an eagle sitting in a nest and probably tending eggs from the behavior that I saw. Over Spieden Island there were several more eagles riding the winds and more mouflon sheep out grazing than you can shake a stick at. For our guests though the expectation is always to see orcas. Therefore a day without them, a day on the water in a truly amazing setting all of the same, may be interpreted as a bad day. Wild animals are tricky beings though and it is wholly out of our capacity to be able to promise a sighting. The same would hold true for companies that make their livings in the presence of lions, tigers or bears, oh my. That which draws us to these creatures is the same thing that makes it so hard for us to be near them. If they were tame like pets, or even performing animals, the mystery would no longer be there and neither would the drive to see them.

This brings me back to the title of this piece and my original questions. Are not wind and waves enough? They are the essence of the salty dog do not forget. And if the wildness of animals is what we long for, then maybe the very wildness that keeps them from us could be our expectation. Rather than just a good show or the desire to view one particular wild species over another. Maybe the expectation could be any species in its natural glory and free in its wild place.

So, from all of us here at San Juan Safaris, we would like to applaud your adventurous spirit and thank you for your patronage and we will...

See You In The Islands!
~Tristen, Naturalist


Orca Whales and Wildlife Are Our Only Business. ©

Adventure on the Inland Seas

We had a last minute private charter today. I was scheduled to laminate, type and answer phones from 8am to 5pm, when in the middle of the afternoon, a man called wanting to charter the boat. His family from Denmark had been delayed an extra week in the states, not able to make it home because of the ash over Europe. The Icelandic that volcano grounded all planes. A lovely family, they enjoyed talking amongst themselves, and translating the stories and facts to their grandmother. The 10 year old grandaughter was especially sharp- reading attentively and quick to understand when I showed her the fathom markings on the chart.

As we left Friday Harbor, we headed north. Immediately after passing the University of Washington Marine Science Labs, we saw 8 Eagles resting along the shoreline in the tops of trees. There was even a pair sharing a branch, resting right next to each other. As eagles mate for life, it's easy to venture that they're a mated pair.

Soon after, we spotted 2 Harbor Porpoise calves. Tiny little things, we ALMOST didn't see them. They plunged through the water quickly, only their dorsal fins sticking out. It's been discovered by Anna Hall, scientist out of Victoria and naturalist that Harbor Porpoise in this area have a small home range, and because of this, memorize the geographical features. By extension, during the day they are visual hunters, saving echolocation clicks for the dark.

At Green Point off Speiden, we had the best view of 1,500 pound male Steller Sea Lions swimming that I've ever seen. They would come up for 3 short breaths and then dive to continue the hunt. When we first got to the scene there was a flock of gulls scavenging leftovers. That's how we first spotted the sea lion, because he came up in the middle of the flock, sending them scattering. My favorite sight of the day were the Bonaparte Gulls on the scene in their breeding plumage. Bonaparte's are tiny and look more like graceful terns than gulls.

It was truly 'an adventure on the high sea' for as we rounded Turn Point, we saw an abandoned skiff. An unusual scene, the boat still had the owner's wallet and passport onboard and unfortunately, a suicide note. It was inferred that the man used an anchor to weigh himself down. The skiff was discovered at the boundary between Canada and America by Canadian whale watching boat 'Neptune.'

The skipper and passengers on the Neptune secured the area while waiting for the Coastguard. They were the first to discover tonight's news. When a mayday call is broadcast, any boat that is nearby and able to help, is absolutely required to do so. There are times when passengers on a cruise become witness to rescue efforts, or rescuers themselves.

There are approximately 172 islands in the San Juans at high tide, but about 700 landmasses at low tide, which means that at high tide, hundreds of landmasses are possibly only a few feet below the surface of the water, which means that they aren't visible but they are a threat. Boats often run aground, and the publication '11 Most Commonly Hit Rocks and Reefs' is something that savvy boaters memorize. Responsible boaters in the San Juans use fathometers, GPS and radar. The good news is that if you run into trouble in the San Juans, help is never far away as this is a populated area. Boating is far safer than kayaking or rock climbing, but its good to have a reminder that the unexpected does happen, and you may just get more than you paid for. It truly is an outdoor adventure.

Orca Whales and Wildlife Are Our Only Business. ©

Alexandra Morton-Whales and Salmon

Wild Salmon are sacred, the Get Out Migration
Vancouver Island, April 23 - May 8
The Get Out Migration is a call to action to make government aware that we want wild salmon to take higher priority than farm salmon. Farms belong on land. We will start walking from Sointula, at the north end of Vancouver Island, on April 23 and arrive in Victoria May 8. Hundreds of people have pledged to walk portions of the trip, there are events under planning every night (itinerary).
There are simultaneous migrations springing up in BC and other places in the world (See here). People are making salmon flags, placcards and artwork to carry as they join us on the way. On May 8 we do the final stretch from the Vancouver ferry to the Victoria Parliament Buildings.
This is an opportunity for every single person who wants wild salmon to make themselves visible to government. Unless we all stand up our fish will continuing dying of politics that no longer serve the people, nor our living world.
People are also taking action by signing our global petition for wild salmon, joining 20,000 people in signing the letter to the Minister of Fisheries, sending a card to westcoast Fisheries critic MP Fin Donnelly. And send us pictures of your wild salmon art and you.
The tragedy of the commons is common but if we all stand up we do not have to be this tragedy.
I look forward to seeing you downstream,
Alexandra Morton


I you have not read her book "Listening to the Whales and What They Have Taught Us"
you are in for a treat!
Orca Whales and Wildlife Are Our Only Business. ©

Sail Aboard the Adventuress

YOU ARE INVITED TO SAIL WITH US ABOARD THE ADVENTURESS:

FOSS WATERWAY, TACOMA
SATURDAY, MAY 1, 2010
5pm to 8pm

ELLIOTT BAY MARINA, SEATTLE
TUESDAY, JUNE 15, 2010
5pm to 8pm

Join People For Puget Sound, friends and supporters aboard the historic wooden ship Adventuress for light refreshments, some marine ecology, and a working sailing trip.

$35: Salish Sea Society Members
$40: People For Puget Sound Members
$45: Non-members
$10: Kids 12-18 (under 12, free)

203.382.7007x120

Orca Whales and Wildlife Are Our Only Business. ©

10% for Earth Day to People for Puget Sound

Bill Wright, co owner of San Juan Safaris, holds dear People for Puget Sound. He has been on their board for two years. That is why, in addition to all the time and money Bill and San Juan Safaris gives, we will donate an additional 10% of our, first daily. tour out for the season,


Executive Director of People For Puget Sound urged the government to remember that the fate of Puget Sound’s iconic killer whale population hangs in the balance. The Southern Resident population of killer whales is at a critically low level of fewer than 90 individuals, despite several new calves in the last year.

In a 2008 study by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the government concluded that the Columbia River hydropower dams do not affect Puget Sound’s Southern Resident Killer Whales – even though the dams are responsible for killing hundreds of thousands of chinook salmon each year. Chinook make up more than 70 percent of the diet of those killer whales (also called orcas).

“NOAA’s own research has found that Southern Residents are jeopardized by salmon population declines as far south as California,” said Kathy Fletcher, Executive Director of People For Puget Sound, who sent the letter to Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke and NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco. “NOAA’s conclusion – that low chinook populations close to home in the Columbia River have no effect on our orcas – just doesn’t hold water.”

Salmon Cam click here

Orca Whales and Wildlife Are Our Only Business. ©

Fly In July 24, 2010 Plan Your Trip NOW!

Yes,
Friday Harbor Airport has a FLY IN scheduled for July 24 10 AM to 4:00 PM.
Warbirds will be flying in, pilots from the northwest and way beyond. Navy Whidbey Island will bring their Search and Rescue Helicopter. Island Air & Westwind Aviation will have booths. Flight simulator from Westwind Aviation will have an in-hangar exhibit. Paper airplane making for the kids. Food and commemorative items for sale too.

More information

Orca Whales and Wildlife Are Our Only Business. ©

Whales, Wildlife and What We Throw Out

A gray whale that died after stranding on a West Seattle beach had a large amount of trash in its stomach, ranging from a pair of sweatpants to a golf ball, said biologists who examined the animal.

Scientists with the Cascadia Research Collective said the examination did not immediately determine why the 37-foot near-adult male died, but it was found to be in better nutritional condition than other gray whales that died recently. Starvation was not considered a major contributor to its death.

In a news release, the research organization said the animal found Thursday had more than 50 gallons of material in its stomach. Most was algae, typical of the bottom-feeding whales, but "a surprising amount of human debris" also was found.

Besides the pants and golf ball, the trash included more than 20 plastic bags, small towels, surgical gloves, plastic pieces and duct tape.

More at



Orca Whales and Wildlife Are Our Only Business. ©

Finally! A sunny day in the San Juan Islands. Although we're situated in the rainy pacific northwest, the San Juan islands see more sun than Seattle, Washington or even Portland, Oregon. Which is counter intuitive, because in the Pacific Northwest, the further north you get, the more rain you stand to have fall on your head. Texas actually has more annual rainfall than Washington, but it comes in torrential downpours accompanied by amazing displays of thunder and lightning, like the Gods ARE fighting on Mt. Olympus. But here in the Pacific Northwest, its more as if an angel were crying; we receive a little rain each day, a slight suppressing drizzle that keeps the sky covered in a nimbostratus cloud.

The Olympic Peninsula, to our south features the temperate rain forest whereas, just 30 miles to the north, San Juan Island features cactus. The question is, how can you get such an ecological shift in such a short distance?? San Juan Island is surrounded by a protective ring of mountains, the Olympics to our south, the Cascades to our east and the Coast mountains to our north and west. The clouds occasionally get caught on the tops of these mountains, leaving us in a ring of sunlight. And that's the rain shadow. There's is nothing on this planet like being on the sea in the sun, where water reflects light like a mirror. Even the dorsal fins of the Orcas reflect the light. Today we saw 8 Transients, heading south, including a calf.

Orcas gestate for 16-17 months and nurse for about 2 years. A female only gives birth once every 3-5 years. The calves are born tail first to enable their survival, that way they don't drown during the birthing process. Like most mammals, including humans, the calves are excitable and curious. Often when a calf first learns to breach, it will breach over and over again as if to say to the world, 'This feels good!' We once had an Orca breach a few feet away from our boat, which is surprising considering their amazing powers of echolocation. They have an incredibly accurate sense of their surroundings.


Orca Whales and Wildlife Are Our Only Business. ©

Trekking Transients

You never can tell how a day will turn out. Even ones that seem to have the least number of prospects can turn out to be the most exciting. As was the case yesterday. With Capt. Craig driving the M/V Sea Lion, Capt. Jeff motoring along in the M/V Kittiwake and Nancy, Lauren and me crewing we headed off on a northern wildlife tour. As we neared Spieden Island though our plans changed drastically with the receipt of a report of transient orcas outside of Victoria harbor. Away we flew towards Canada and some black-and-whites.

The day was calm and the slack tide made the trip across Haro Strait lovely. 30 miles later, and nearly to Race Rocks, we saw those beautiful orcas. As we cruised along I was able to identify the male as T103, which was then confirmed by one of the other boats. The female that was traveling with him remained a mystery, but they made a majestic pair. They slowly swam west seemingly without a care in the world, affording all of the guests a chance to make memories of a lifetime.

Finally it was time to head back and what a different trip that was. Gone were the nice calm waters of our trip over. The tide had changed and the flooding tide, along with some wind, turned the Strait of Juan de Fuca into a rodeo. With 3-4 foot seas, we were rocking and rolling all of the way through Cattle Pass. The guests were having a ball though laughing as they got blasted by waves and watched the M/V Kittiwake bounce along behind us. Through the skill of our captains we made it back with all on board and in time to catch the 4:15 p.m. ferry to Anacortes.

So, another successful whale watching trip was logged by San Juan Safaris. Thank you to all of our fearless guests, captains and crew, and we will...

See You In The Islands!
~Tristen, Naturalist


Orca Whales and Wildlife Are Our Only Business. ©

The Transient Orcas are out in full force. They've been in the area for at least the past 4 days. We headed out of Friday Harbor, up the east side of San Juan Island. As we were reaching Speiden Channel, Captain Jeff got the report. "There are black and whites south at Victoria."

Speiden Island has a fascinating history that includes the antics of two taxidermist brothers. Imported Muflon Sheep, English Fallow Deer, and Japanese Sika Deer graze its hillsides under the watchful eye of soaring eagles. Glacial erratics adorn its slopes, whispering the story of the Vashon ice age to those who will listen. An eagle's nest practically hovers above the water in a tree that sticks out of the rocky slope at a 45 degree angle. But despite this impressiveness, we sped on, realizing that the Orcas were within our reach.

A male with an especially towering dorsal fin accompanied a female. They swam closely, their bodies touching, resting, sleeping while they swam. In dolphins in captivity, its been proven that they are actually turning one hemisphere of their brain off, resting that hemisphere so to speak, and using their other hemisphere to continue to surface and breathe.

There is so much about the Orcas that we don't know. Since they spend 95% of their lives under water, much is still a mystery. For years we thought the Southern Resident Community of Orcas, consisting of 3 pods, did NOT breed within their own pods. But based on recent paternity tests using DNA samples, we have realized that they do in fact breed within their own pods. Since the Northern Resident Community does not appear to be exhibiting this same behavior, we assume they have bred in their own pods out of necessity, out of a lack of breeding aged males.

On the way back to Friday Harbor we had 3-4 foot waves. It was a rough ride. One passenger was all giggles and smiles, enjoying it as one would a roller coaster. Things finally calmed down when we came into San Juan Channel on the lee side of the island, protected from a southwest wind.
Orca Whales and Wildlife Are Our Only Business. ©

Baby Orca Whales Doing Fine

Two new calves

so far for 2010

From the Vancouver Sun

Then: In February 2009, the endangered southern resident killer-whale population got a boost -- two new orca calves were spotted swimming in the waters off Victoria and Nanaimo. The births excited Ken Balcomb, executive director at the Friday Harbor-based Center for Whale Research, which tracks the resident orca population along Washington state and southern B.C.'s coastlines. Balcomb said the calves brought the depressed population's numbers up to 85 -- they historically hover around 120 over three pods. He noted, however, that the mortality rate for first-year calves is 50 per cent.

Now: The orca babies dubbed J44 and L112 made it through the winter, said Balcomb this week, along with three more born in 2009. So far in 2010, two calves have been born.

"Two new calves this year, J47 and L114, appeared to be in good health, as are all of the calves born last year," Balcomb said.

Orca Whales and Wildlife Are Our Only Business. ©

A gray day in the San Juans, we were not sure we were going to find any whales. Although the San Juan Islands are located in the rainshadow, surrounded by a protective ring of mountains in the Olympics and Cascades, it was rainy, and the residents that normally grace us had not been seen in the area. Captain Jeff was planning on heading north.

At the last minute, before we left, we heard a secret- there was a large group at Race Rocks headed east, towards us, towards Friday Harbor. We took the Sea Lion south past Long Island, where we saw not just a pair of two mated eagles, but two juveniles as well, a large eagle's nest that will someday be so heavy, it possibly knocks down the tree its sitting in, shnitzel shaped Harbor seals and 1,500 pound steller sea lions barking on whale rocks. I like to joke that when harbor seals move, they look like their doing the worm in breakdancing. And if you've ever done the worm in break dancing, you know how hard it is. Harbor seals don't have much for front flippers, so its hard for them to stroll across the land like their confident sea lion friends, but they manage, often waiting for the tide to float them on or off the rock.

I shared our glimmer of hope with the passengers, "The whales are 32 nautical miles away, we're doing about 7 knots and it will take us a full 2 hours to get there. That is not an option. However we're headed in their direction, hoping that we'll meet up as they keep moving east." Captain Jeff persevered, and lo and behold, eventually we saw whale watching boats in the distance. We shared squeals of delight followed by high fives as we realized our long trip across the Canadian-American border had paid off. Dorsal fins and blows were finally in the distance.

Upon getting there, we identified about 12 transients, a large group for stealthy marine mammal eating Orcas. One of them, T63 was especially astounding as he had 2 equally sized chunks taken out of the top of his dorsal fin, possibly from prey that fought back. Transients are responsible for the ancient demonic portrayal of the Orca, as the fisherman saw them attacking mammals such as dolphins, porpoise, seals, even other whales, and thought they'd attack them too. However, there has never been an attack on a human by an Orca in the wild- captivity is another story...best saved for another day.


Orca Whales and Wildlife Are Our Only Business. ©

Orcas Love Boats ?

Boats harassing whales? I think not. There is a rare boat, usually driven by someone in the public sector, not a whale watching operator, that gets too close or actually runs over the top of them.
Here is a photo taken last week by Capt. Jim Maya of San Juan Island's Mayas Charters.
See if YOU think the boat is harassing the whales.

Pictured are a group of transient orca whales.

Here is an excerpt from Ken Balcomb, Center for Whale Research, top srkw scientist:

The beefed-up surveillance doesn't impress Ken Balcomb, executive director at the Center for Whale Research, based in Friday Harbor, Wash. Balcomb was stopped by the RCMP for an "extended interview" March 25 while investigating killer whale activity off Victoria. "It is a great federal employment opportunity, but irrelevant to saving the south resident killer whales. They need salmon, and that should be [the] first priority, to manage salmon accordingly," Balcomb said in an e-mail. more


Orca Whales and Wildlife Are Our Only Business. ©

Transient Orca Photo from Saturday April 10, 2010

Sent in by our guest William Clift and taken on this past Saturday's tour, here are two photos of the Transient Orca Whales after a kill of a seal.
Note all the sea birds around jostling for their share of the left over tid bits.

This is off the east side of Lopez Island. It was an unusual location. And it was an unusual sight to catch transient orcas in the act of "the kill".

These photos will be entered in the 2010 photo contest.

Orca Whales and Wildlife Are Our Only Business. ©

Why We Travel by Pico Iyer

Why we travel

It whirls you around, turns you upside down and stands everything you took for granted on its head.

By Pico Iyer

We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again -- to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more. The beauty of this whole process was best described, perhaps, before people even took to frequent flying, by George Santayana in his lapidary essay, "The Philosophy of Travel." We "need sometimes," the Harvard philosopher wrote, "to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard, in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what."

I like that stress on work, since never more than on the road are we shown how proportional our blessings are to the difficulty that precedes them; and I like the stress on a holiday that's "moral" since we fall into our ethical habits as easily as into our beds at night. Few of us ever forget the connection between "travel" and "travail," and I know that I travel in large part in search of hardship -- both my own, which I want to feel, and others', which I need to see. Travel in that sense guides us toward a better balance of wisdom and compassion -- of seeing the world clearly, and yet feeling it truly. For seeing without feeling can obviously be uncaring; while feeling without seeing can be blind.

Yet for me the first great joy of traveling is simply the luxury of leaving all my beliefs and certainties at home, and seeing everything I thought I knew in a different light, and from a crooked angle. In that regard, even a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet (in Beijing) or a scratchy revival showing of "Wild Orchids" (on the Champs-Elysees) can be both novelty and revelation: In China, after all, people will pay a whole week's wages to eat with Colonel Sanders, and in Paris, Mickey Rourke is regarded as the greatest actor since Jerry Lewis.

If a Mongolian restaurant seems exotic to us in Evanston, Ill., it only follows that a McDonald's would seem equally exotic in Ulan Bator -- or, at least, equally far from everything expected. Though it's fashionable nowadays to draw a distinction between the "tourist" and the "traveler," perhaps the real distinction lies between those who leave their assumptions at home, and those who don't: Among those who don't, a tourist is just someone who complains, "Nothing here is the way it is at home," while a traveler is one who grumbles, "Everything here is the same as it is in Cairo -- or Cuzco or Kathmandu." It's all very much the same.

But for the rest of us, the sovereign freedom of traveling comes from the fact that it whirls you around and turns you upside down, and stands everything you took for granted on its head. If a diploma can famously be a passport (to a journey through hard realism), a passport can be a diploma (for a crash course in cultural relativism). And the first lesson we learn on the road, whether we like it or not, is how provisional and provincial are the things we imagine to be universal. When you go to North Korea, for example, you really do feel as if you've landed on a different planet -- and the North Koreans doubtless feel that they're being visited by an extra-terrestrial, too (or else they simply assume that you, as they do, receive orders every morning from the Central Committee on what clothes to wear and what route to use when walking to work, and you, as they do, have loudspeakers in your bedroom broadcasting propaganda every morning at dawn, and you, as they do, have your radios fixed so as to receive only a single channel).

We travel, then, in part just to shake up our complacencies by seeing all the moral and political urgencies, the life-and-death dilemmas, that we seldom have to face at home. And we travel to fill in the gaps left by tomorrow's headlines: When you drive down the streets of Port-au-Prince, for example, where there is almost no paving and women relieve themselves next to mountains of trash, your notions of the Internet and a "one world order" grow usefully revised. Travel is the best way we have of rescuing the humanity of places, and saving them from abstraction and ideology.

And in the process, we also get saved from abstraction ourselves, and come to see how much we can bring to the places we visit, and how much we can become a kind of carrier pigeon -- an anti-Federal Express, if you like -- in transporting back and forth what every culture needs. I find that I always take Michael Jordan posters to Kyoto, and bring woven ikebana baskets back to California; I invariably travel to Cuba with a suitcase piled high with bottles of Tylenol and bars of soap, and come back with one piled high with salsa tapes, and hopes, and letters to long-lost brothers.

But more significantly, we carry values and beliefs and news to the places we go, and in many parts of the world, we become walking video screens and living newspapers, the only channels that can take people out of the censored limits of their homelands. In closed or impoverished places, like Pagan or Lhasa or Havana, we are the eyes and ears of the people we meet, their only contact with the world outside and, very often, the closest, quite literally, they will ever come to Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton. Not the least of the challenges of travel, therefore, is learning how to import -- and export -- dreams with tenderness.

By now all of us have heard (too often) the old Proust line about how the real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new places but in seeing with new eyes. Yet one of the subtler beauties of travel is that it enables you to bring new eyes to the people you encounter. Thus even as holidays help you appreciate your own home more -- not least by seeing it through a distant admirer's eyes -- they help you bring newly appreciative -- distant -- eyes to the places you visit. You can teach them what they have to celebrate as much as you celebrate what they have to teach. This, I think, is how tourism, which so obviously destroys cultures, can also resuscitate or revive them, how it has created new "traditional" dances in Bali, and caused craftsmen in India to pay new attention to their works. If the first thing we can bring the Cubans is a real and balanced sense of what contemporary America is like, the second -- and perhaps more important -- thing we can bring them is a fresh and renewed sense of how special are the warmth and beauty of their country, for those who can compare it with other places around the globe.

Thus travel spins us round in two ways at once: It shows us the sights and values and issues that we might ordinarily ignore; but it also, and more deeply, shows us all the parts of ourselves that might otherwise grow rusty. For in traveling to a truly foreign place, we inevitably travel to moods and states of mind and hidden inward passages that we'd otherwise seldom have cause to visit.

On the most basic level, when I'm in Thailand, though a teetotaler who usually goes to bed at 9 p.m., I stay up till dawn in the local bars; and in Tibet, though not a real Buddhist, I spend days on end in temples, listening to the chants of sutras. I go to Iceland to visit the lunar spaces within me, and, in the uncanny quietude and emptiness of that vast and treeless world, to tap parts of myself generally obscured by chatter and routine.

We travel, then, in search of both self and anonymity -- and, of course, in finding the one we apprehend the other. Abroad, we are wonderfully free of caste and job and standing; we are, as Hazlitt puts it, just the "gentlemen in the parlour," and people cannot put a name or tag to us. And precisely because we are clarified in this way, and freed of inessential labels, we have the opportunity to come into contact with more essential parts of ourselves (which may begin to explain why we may feel most alive when far from home).

Abroad is the place where we stay up late, follow impulse and find ourselves as wide open as when we are in love. We live without a past or future, for a moment at least, and are ourselves up for grabs and open to interpretation. We even may become mysterious -- to others, at first, and sometimes to ourselves -- and, as no less a dignitary than Oliver Cromwell once noted, "A man never goes so far as when he doesn't know where he is going."

There are, of course, great dangers to this, as to every kind of freedom, but the great promise of it is that, traveling, we are born again, and able to return at moments to a younger and a more open kind of self. Traveling is a way to reverse time, to a small extent, and make a day last a year -- or at least 45 hours -- and traveling is an easy way of surrounding ourselves, as in childhood, with what we cannot understand. Language facilitates this cracking open, for when we go to France, we often migrate to French, and the more childlike self, simple and polite, that speaking a foreign language educes. Even when I'm not speaking pidgin English in Hanoi, I'm simplified in a positive way, and concerned not with expressing myself, but simply making sense.

So travel, for many of us, is a quest for not just the unknown, but the unknowing; I, at least, travel in search of an innocent eye that can return me to a more innocent self. I tend to believe more abroad than I do at home (which, though treacherous again, can at least help me to extend my vision), and I tend to be more easily excited abroad, and even kinder. And since no one I meet can "place" me -- no one can fix me in my risumi --I can remake myself for better, as well as, of course, for worse (if travel is notoriously a cradle for false identities, it can also, at its best, be a crucible for truer ones). In this way, travel can be a kind of monasticism on the move: On the road, we often live more simply (even when staying in a luxury hotel), with no more possessions than we can carry, and surrendering ourselves to chance.

This is what Camus meant when he said that "what gives value to travel is fear" -- disruption, in other words, (or emancipation) from circumstance, and all the habits behind which we hide. And that is why many of us travel not in search of answers, but of better questions. I, like many people, tend to ask questions of the places I visit, and relish most the ones that ask the most searching questions back of me: In Paraguay, for example, where one car in every two is stolen, and two-thirds of the goods on sale are smuggled, I have to rethink my every Californian assumption. And in Thailand, where many young women give up their bodies in order to protect their families -- to become better Buddhists -- I have to question my own too-ready judgments. "The ideal travel book," Christopher Isherwood once said, "should be perhaps a little like a crime story in which you're in search of something." And it's the best kind of something, I would add, if it's one that you can never quite find.

I remember, in fact, after my first trips to Southeast Asia, more than a decade ago, how I would come back to my apartment in New York, and lie in my bed, kept up by something more than jet lag, playing back, in my memory, over and over, all that I had experienced, and paging wistfully though my photographs and reading and re-reading my diaries, as if to extract some mystery from them. Anyone witnessing this strange scene would have drawn the right conclusion: I was in love.

For if every true love affair can feel like a journey to a foreign country, where you can't quite speak the language, and you don't know where you're going, and you're pulled ever deeper into the inviting darkness, every trip to a foreign country can be a love affair, where you're left puzzling over who you are and whom you've fallen in love with. All the great travel books are love stories, by some reckoning -- from the Odyssey and the Aeneid to the Divine Comedy and the New Testament -- and all good trips are, like love, about being carried out of yourself and deposited in the midst of terror and wonder.

And what this metaphor also brings home to us is that all travel is a two-way transaction, as we too easily forget, and if warfare is one model of the meeting of nations, romance is another. For what we all too often ignore when we go abroad is that we are objects of scrutiny as much as the people we scrutinize, and we are being consumed by the cultures we consume, as much on the road as when we are at home. At the very least, we are objects of speculation (and even desire) who can seem as exotic to the people around us as they do to us.

We are the comic props in Japanese home-movies, the oddities in Maliese anecdotes and the fall-guys in Chinese jokes; we are the moving postcards or bizarre objets trouves that villagers in Peru will later tell their friends about. If travel is about the meeting of realities, it is no less about the mating of illusions: You give me my dreamed-of vision of Tibet, and I'll give you your wished-for California. And in truth, many of us, even (or especially) the ones who are fleeing America abroad, will get taken, willy-nilly, as symbols of the American Dream.

That, in fact, is perhaps the most central and most wrenching of the questions travel proposes to us: how to respond to the dream that people tender to you? Do you encourage their notions of a Land of Milk and Honey across the horizon, even if it is the same land you've abandoned? Or do you try to dampen their enthusiasm for a place that exists only in the mind? To quicken their dreams may, after all, be to match-make them with an illusion; yet to dash them may be to strip them of the one possession that sustains them in adversity.

That whole complex interaction -- not unlike the dilemmas we face with those we love (how do we balance truthfulness and tact?) -- is partly the reason why so many of the great travel writers, by nature, are enthusiasts: not just Pierre Loti, who famously, infamously, fell in love wherever he alighted (an archetypal sailor leaving offspring in the form of Madame Butterfly myths), but also Henry Miller, D.H. Lawrence or Graham Greene, all of whom bore out the hidden truth that we are optimists abroad as readily as pessimists as home. None of them was by any means blind to the deficiencies of the places around them, but all, having chosen to go there, chose to find something to admire.

All, in that sense, believed in "being moved" as one of the points of taking trips, and "being transported" by private as well as public means; all saw that "ecstasy" ("ex-stasis") tells us that our highest moments come when we're not stationary, and that epiphany can follow movement as much as it precipitates it. I remember once asking the great travel writer Norman Lewis if he'd ever be interested in writing on apartheid South Africa. He looked at me astonished. "To write well about a thing," he said, "I've got to like it!"

At the same time, as all this is intrinsic to travel, from Ovid to O'Rourke, travel itself is changing as the world does, and with it, the mandate of the travel writer. It's not enough to go to the ends of the earth these days (not least because the ends of the earth are often coming to you); and where a writer like Jan Morris could, a few years ago, achieve something miraculous simply by voyaging to all the great cities of the globe, now anyone with a Visa card can do that. So where Morris, in effect, was chronicling the last days of the Empire, a younger travel writer is in a better position to chart the first days of a new Empire, post-national, global, mobile and yet as diligent as the Raj in transporting its props and its values around the world.

In the mid-19th century, the British famously sent the Bible and Shakespeare and cricket round the world; now a more international kind of Empire is sending Madonna and the Simpsons and Brad Pitt. And the way in which each culture takes in this common pool of references tells you as much about them as their indigenous products might. Madonna in an Islamic country, after all, sounds radically different from Madonna in a Confucian one, and neither begins to mean the same as Madonna on East 14th Street. When you go to a McDonald's outlet in Kyoto, you will find Teriyaki McBurgers and Bacon Potato Pies. The placemats offer maps of the great temples of the city, and the posters all around broadcast the wonders of San Francisco. And -- most crucial of all -- the young people eating their Big Macs, with baseball caps worn backwards, and tight 501 jeans, are still utterly and inalienably Japanese in the way they move, they nod, they sip their Oolong teas -- and never to be mistaken for the patrons of a McDonald's outlet in Rio, Morocco or Managua. These days a whole new realm of exotica arises out of the way one culture colors and appropriates the products of another.

The other factor complicating and exciting all of this is people, who are, more and more, themselves as many-tongued and mongrel as cities like Sydney or Toronto or Hong Kong. I am, in many ways, an increasingly typical specimen, if only because I was born, as the son of Indian parents, in England, moved to America at 7 and cannot really call myself an Indian, an American or an Englishman. I was, in short, a traveler at birth, for whom even a visit to the candy store was a trip through a foreign world where no one I saw quite matched my parents' inheritance, or my own. And though some of this is involuntary and tragic -- the number of refugees in the world, which came to just 2.5 million in 1970, is now at least 27.4 million -- it does involve, for some of us, the chance to be transnational in a happier sense, able to adapt anywhere, used to being outsiders everywhere and forced to fashion our own rigorous sense of home. (And if nowhere is quite home, we can be optimists everywhere.)

Besides, even those who don't move around the world find the world moving more and more around them. Walk just six blocks, in Queens or Berkeley, and you're traveling through several cultures in as many minutes; get into a cab outside the White House, and you're often in a piece of Addis Ababa. And technology, too, compounds this (sometimes deceptive) sense of availability, so that many people feel they can travel around the world without leaving the room -- through cyberspace or CD-ROMs, videos and virtual travel. There are many challenges in this, of course, in what it says about essential notions of family and community and loyalty, and in the worry that air-conditioned, purely synthetic versions of places may replace the real thing -- not to mention the fact that the world seems increasingly in flux, a moving target quicker than our notions of it. But there is, for the traveler at least, the sense that learning about home and learning about a foreign world can be one and the same thing.

All of us feel this from the cradle, and know, in some sense, that all the significant movement we ever take is internal. We travel when we see a movie, strike up a new friendship, get held up. Novels are often journeys as much as travel books are fictions; and though this has been true since at least as long ago as Sir John Mandeville's colorful 14th century accounts of a Far East he'd never visited, it's an even more shadowy distinction now, as genre distinctions join other borders in collapsing.

In Mary Morris's "House Arrest," a thinly disguised account of Castro's Cuba, the novelist reiterates, on the copyright page, "All dialogue is invented. Isabella, her family, the inhabitants and even la isla itself are creations of the author's imagination." On Page 172, however, we read, "La isla, of course, does exist. Don't let anyone fool you about that. It just feels as if it doesn't. But it does." No wonder the travel-writer narrator -- a fictional construct (or not)? -- confesses to devoting her travel magazine column to places that never existed. "Erewhon," after all, the undiscovered land in Samuel Butler's great travel novel, is just "nowhere" rearranged.

Travel, then, is a voyage into that famously subjective zone, the imagination, and what the traveler brings back is -- and has to be -- an ineffable compound of himself and the place, what's really there and what's only in him. Thus Bruce Chatwin's books seem to dance around the distinction between fact and fancy. V.S. Naipaul's recent book, "A Way in the World," was published as a non-fictional "series" in England and a "novel" in the United States. And when some of the stories in Paul Theroux's half-invented memoir, "My Other Life," were published in The New Yorker, they were slyly categorized as "Fact and Fiction."

And since travel is, in a sense, about the conspiracy of perception and imagination, the two great travel writers, for me, to whom I constantly return are Emerson and Thoreau (the one who famously advised that "traveling is a fool's paradise," and the other who "traveled a good deal in Concord"). Both of them insist on the fact that reality is our creation, and that we invent the places we see as much as we do the books that we read. What we find outside ourselves has to be inside ourselves for us to find it. Or, as Sir Thomas Browne sagely put it, "We carry within us the wonders we seek without us. There is Africa and her prodigies in us."

So, if more and more of us have to carry our sense of home inside us, we also -- Emerson and Thoreau remind us -- have to carry with us our sense of destination. The most valuable Pacifics we explore will always be the vast expanses within us, and the most important Northwest Crossings the thresholds we cross in the heart. The virtue of finding a gilded pavilion in Kyoto is that it allows you to take back a more lasting, private Golden Temple to your office in Rockefeller Center.

And even as the world seems to grow more exhausted, our travels do not, and some of the finest travel books in recent years have been those that undertake a parallel journey, matching the physical steps of a pilgrimage with the metaphysical steps of a questioning (as in Peter Matthiessen's great "The Snow Leopard"), or chronicling a trip to the farthest reaches of human strangeness (as in Oliver Sack's "Island of the Color-Blind," which features a journey not just to a remote atoll in the Pacific, but to a realm where people actually see light differently). The most distant shores, we are constantly reminded, lie within the person asleep at our side.

So travel, at heart, is just a quick way to keeping our minds mobile and awake. As Santayana, the heir to Emerson and Thoreau with whom I began, wrote, "There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar; it keeps the mind nimble; it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor." Romantic poets inaugurated an era of travel because they were the great apostles of open eyes. Buddhist monks are often vagabonds, in part because they believe in wakefulness. And if travel is like love, it is, in the end, mostly because it's a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, undimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end.

Orca Whales and Wildlife Are Our Only Business. ©

Washington Taxes Bottle Water, Soda, Candy & Beer

OLYMPIA, Wash. -- A multimillion-dollar revenue package that increases taxes on bottled water, soda, candy and mass-produced beer was approved by the Washington state Legislature as lawmakers finished their work to plug a $2.8 billion budget deficit.

Just hours before the Legislature adjourned the special session, the Senate passed, on a 25-21 vote, the measure that makes up about $668 million of Democrats' nearly $800 million revenue package. The House passed the bill Saturday, and it now goes to Gov. Chris Gregoire.

The Senate tax vote came Monday evening, and the Legislature adjourned the special session early Tuesday morning.

More at

Orca Whales and Wildlife Are Our Only Business. ©

NEW bald eagle on San Juan Island video

Bald Eagles bathing on San Juan Island, I shot this Sunday.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sq-mN_mXklI

Orca Whales and Wildlife Are Our Only Business. ©

On The Road Again!

The whale road that is. Well, world's largest dolphin road to be exact. That is right, today we saw orcas! A small pod of transient orcas was spotted on the east side of Lopez Island near a reef called Bird Rock. When we arrived on scene it was to find two males and 3-4 female transient orcas in an active feeding pattern. We did not get to see any confirmed kills, but they were definitely an active bunch with lots of diving and not much time spent at the surface. We were able to get a good look at one of the males though and determine that it was T87. He is usually seen in the company of several females, so yesterday was not an unusual grouping. The other male with the group may have been T90, but he was being reclusive and staying well away from where the other animals were feeding.

Even though we never saw a kill, the presence of sea gulls and marine birds in the immediate area suggests that there was food in the water. Whether it was a school of fish or the remnants of the orcas' lunch we will never know. It made it much easier to track the orcas though with all of those birds around.

On our ride back to Friday Harbor we cruised around the south end of Lopez Island and up through Cattle Pass. At Whale Rocks we saw Steller's sea lions and there was a bald eagle in the top of a tree at Cape San Juan. We even got to wave hello to Capt. Craig's wife Peggy as we passed by the shore on our way up San Juan Channel.

It was a windy, but good, day to be on the water and our great group of guests had a fun time with our local wildlife. So, from all of us at San Juan Safaris, we would like to extend a warm welcome and congratulations to our new captain Jeff Wood and a thank you to all of you. Do not forget, we will...

See You In The Islands!
~Tristen, Naturalist


Orca Whales and Wildlife Are Our Only Business. ©

Transient Orca Whale Today

Our boat Sea Lion spent about 1/2 an hour with 5 transient orca whales today off Lopez Island.
Captain Craig told me they even made a kill while guests were watching. He said the water was clear and calm. Today it is about 50 degrees with a slight wind may be 10 - 15 knots.

Due to demand, we have added a tour Sunday, April 18 at 12:30 PM.
Get your reservations in now. 800 450 6858.

Orca Whales and Wildlife Are Our Only Business. ©

Win A Week End in the San Juan Islands!

The San Juan Islands are a Northwest gem. Located near Seattle, they offer their own array of natural beauty in the form of rock and sand beaches, sprawling forests, lakes and protected wetlands. The Islands also happen to the be epicenter of whale watching in the Northwest, where you can see massive Orca Whales in their natural habitat.

If you live in the Northwest, and want to experience the San Juan Islands through a weekend of whale watching, this is your chance. Enter the San Juan Whale Watching Weekend Contest, sponsored by ExOfficio, here, by submitting a photo that depicts your idea of Northwest Adventure at its finest. On May 15th, we’ll pick the photo that best demonstrates Northwest Adventure, and the winner will receive round-trip tickets from Seattle to the San Juan Islands aboard Kenmore Air; as well as one night for two at the Earthbox Motel and Spa in Friday Harbor; and whale watching tickets for two with San Juan Safaris.

More Infor?
Orca Whales and Wildlife Are Our Only Business. ©

Hawaii Herb (San Juan Safarsi Honorary Crew) and Humpbacks

Our "honorary crew" Herb Hartman, sent these photos to me last evening. They are really great shots of the Humpback Whales in Hawaii, where Herb is currently living. Herb will be joining us in July with his smiley face, welcome sense of humor and of course, his camera. Here are the photos:

Top to bottom:
2 Male Humpback Whales
1 Male Humpback surfacing
Humpback head lunge
Humpback fluke (note the tiny dorsal fin)







Orca Whales and Wildlife Are Our Only Business. ©

Island Farm and Feast May 14 to May 16 San Juan Island

Island Farm & Feast

May 14 -16

Come to San Juan Island for a weekend filled with farm and food activities May 14-16. This first annual event will include more than 15 farms and island restaurants serving locally-grown foods. Experience the farmers' market, farm tours, workshops and cooking classes. Get a list of activities from the San Juan County Agricultural Resources Committee. Then contact the listed farms and restaurants directly to book classes or make dinner reservations. Check out lodging specials and packages valid during this weekend in May.

Orca Whales and Wildlife Are Our Only Business. ©

New Bellingham Waterfront To Come

Port offers glimpse of Bellingham waterfront development plan
BELLINGHAM - A draft waterfront master plan now in its final stages may include a few areas for 20-story buildings as well as early park development to provide some long-promised public access to the central waterfront.

On Tuesday, April 6, Port of Bellingham Environmental Director Mike Stoner gave port commissioners a broad-brush outline of the plan that is nearing completion in a cooperative effort of port and city of Bellingham staffers.
Stoner emphasized that the draft won't be complete until June, at the earliest. After that, it will get a public airing before the city Planning Commission, City Council and Port Commission before a final version is hammered out for review and possible approval by elected officials no sooner than late this year.

More at
JOHN STARK / THE BELLINGHAM HERALD

-----Orca Whales and Wildlife Are Our Only Business. ©

Port of Friday Harbor San Juan Island WA Celebrates

Port of Friday Harbor plans a memorable 60th birthday; Jensen's Shipyard celebrates its 100th

Full Story Click Here

The Port of Friday Harbor celebrates its 60th anniversary this spring and summer with tall ship visits, a fly-in, and a beach party.

The celebration is significant because it comes on the heels of the town's centennial and on the eve of the 100th anniversary of the state legislation that allowed voters to create port districts.

"It's an important tie-in," Friday Harbor Port Executive Director Marilyn O'Connor said. "We want people to understand what ports are and what they do in their communities. At the port and at the airport, we are planning our next set of capital improvements for the next 10 years, so this year marks the end of one chapter and the beginning of another."

The celebration begins the last week of April, timed with the beginning of boating season. The San Juan Island Yacht Club's Rear Commodore's Cruise is April 23-25; the Friday Harbor Sailing Club's Spring Series Races take place in Mitchell Bay April 24-25. The tall ships Lady Washington and Hawaiian Chieftain will tie up at the breakwater dock and Spring Street Landing April 26-30. Harbormaster Tami Hayes said the tall ships will offer interpretive events, evening cruises and tours.

Opening Day ceremonies for boating season follow on May 2. The San Juan Island Yacht Club hosts the Opening Day Boat Parade that day at 2 p.m., in Friday Harbor.

Planning is under way on other events to celebrate the port's 60th. Friday Harbor Airport will host a fly-in in late June. The port will host a community picnic at Jackson's Beach, possibly in July.

Coincidentally, this year is the 100th anniversary of Jensen's Shipyard; the late Nourdine Jensen (1914-2009) was one of the port district's first — and longest-serving — port commissioners. The shipyard is planning a public celebration Sept. 18, noon to 4 p.m.

"We're hoping to invite back Jensen-built boats," said granddaughter Alisa Schoultz, the shipyard's operations manager.

Jensen's son-in-law, Mike Ahrenius, is now a port commissioner. He is also president of the Washington Public Ports Association.

The Journal and SanJuanJournal.com will publish a special section devoted to 60 years of port district history, April 28. The section will include a calendar of celebration-related events.

The Friday Harbor Port District was created by voters in 1950. The district owns and operates Friday Harbor Airport, Friday Harbor Marina, Jackson's Beach, Jack Fairweather Park (commonly referred to as the marina park), and Spring Street Landing. The port district has 26 business tenants at the marina and 19 business tenants on airport property. Airport-property tenants include Skagit Valley College San Juan Center.

The marina has 500 slips with 1,500 feet of floating breakwater, an international seaplane base and U.S. Customs Port of Entry. The marina hosts 15,000 guest boats annually, lands 4,500 seaplanes and clears 4,500 vessels through U.S. Customs. During the 2008 season, the port accommodated 52,000 passengers from cruise ships, local excursion operators, and transportation vessels.

Friday Harbor Airport is the sixth-busiest airport in Washington state. It has a 3,400-foot runway and handles more than 58,000 operations annually. Carriers offer daily service to other islands, Anacortes, Bay View, Bellingham and Boeing Field.

Marilyn O'Connor is port district executive director. The three elected port commissioners are Ahrenius, Greg Hertel, and Barbara Marrett.

Orca Whales and Wildlife Are Our Only Business. ©

Tug Escort and Pacific Northwest Waters

The Value of a Tug in protecting Pacific Waters, Whales and Other Marine Mammals.

The state-funded emergency response tug Hunter, based in Neah Bay, escorted a fully loaded petroleum tanker to Port Angeles on Sunday after rough waters and a problem with its tug prevented it from continuing to California.

The Hunter met up with the tug Corpus Christi and barge Petrochem Supplier -- owned by US Shipping Corp. -- at about 10:30 p.m. Saturday about 40 miles southwest of the Columbia River entrance.

The Hunter stood by through the night in case the articulated tug and barge needed assistance, said the state Department of Ecology, which was also monitoring the situation.

Chad Bowechop, Makah marine affairs manager, said the move was evidence of the good cooperation among agencies.

"This kind of communication was not always there," he said.

"Since the Makah Tribal Council has been involved, the protocols and procedures have really been developed and have worked very well in this case.

"We are very pleased."

Bowechop said the Corpus Christi had failures in the hydraulics, which kept it from pushing the boat over the river bars in the rough waters on Saturday and early Sunday.

Because weather conditions were not expected to improve for several days, the Hunter accompanied the tanker to Port Angeles, where it could be evaluated and, if needed, repaired, he said.

The barge is loaded with about 150,000 barrels -- 6.3 million gallons -- of heavy vacuum gas oil, according to the Coast Guard.

Vacuum gas oil is a heavy residual oil from the petroleum refining process and behaves like a heavy, persistent fuel oil if spilled.

The Corpus Christi steers the ship from the stern -- or the back part of the ship.

Problems arose when the lubricating system for the hydraulics -- which push the ship -- overheated, the Coast Guard said. They did not lose propulsion.

The Coast Guard said even if the locking pins on the system were to completely fail, the tug would be able to tow the barge using an emergency tow cable, but the second tug was called in as a precautionary measure.

The tug's crew has reported no injuries or pollution.

The company and Coast Guard are taking all necessary precautions for a safe resolution to the situation, the Coast Guard said in a news release.

Since 1999, this is the 45th time a publicly funded Neah Bay response tug has stood by or assisted vessels, the Department of Ecology said.

The rough waters were part of the system that caused up to 70-mile-per-hour winds off the Neah Bay coast, but though the waters continued to be rough, the system had mostly passed by late Sunday, said Art Gaebel, meteorologist at the National Weather Service.

He said that another system out of Alaska will hit the North Olympic Peninsula today through Wednesday bringing rain, but the wind should be minimal, and snow should fall only in the mountains.

Because the rain system will be coming from the west it should hit areas of the Peninsula about the same without a rain shadow effect.

"It is pretty typical stuff -- nothing like what we saw on Friday or Saturday," Gaebel said.
From The Peninsula Daily News
Orca Whales and Wildlife Are Our Only Business. ©

And Away We Go...

Can you believe it? Winter is gone and we are back on the water again!

Hello all, it is me, your intrepid marine naturalist here to guide you, teach you, entertain you and celebrate with you all things orca and wildlife. It was a wet but mild winter and now we have graduated to a cool blustery spring. The skies are happy, the plants and wildlife are happy and we salty dogs are happy to be back at what we love. Traveling the waterways of the San Juan Islands.

Today we took our first trip of the season out for a wonderful wildlife tour. It was a little hectic to start as there was a torrential hail storm just before we boarded the guests. Once it stopped though and the boat was ice free we did not get another drop of rain or hail throughout the trip. The M/V Sea Lion was in good shape and ready to go and so were Capt. Craig, Lauren and I. Nothing could keep us back from the tour that we had all been anticipating, and of course the islands did not disappoint.

There were spotted harbor seals on every rock and eagles on every island. Sea gulls, cormorants, auklets and a flock of Bonaparte's gulls all whisked by us on the breezes. Spieden Island is green once again and the herds of mouflon sheep and fallow deer were spread along the prairie right down to the water. Our highlight by far though, was seeing an adult peregrine falcon perched on a cliff side on Stuart Island just below Turn Point Lighthouse. It seemed to be surveying Haro Strait from its seat keeping track of the comings and goings of boats.

It was a great first day back out on the water and I am excited for this season. New babies, old friends and the excitement of time spent on the Salish Sea. So, from all of us here at San Juan Safaris, thank you and we will...

See You In The Islands!
~Tristen, Naturalist


Orca Whales and Wildlife Are Our Only Business. ©

Hail in Friday Harbor San Juan Island April 3, 2010?

Yes hail in Friday Harbor, San Juan Island. And so much that it looked like snow!

Here are guests about to board for a whale watching and wildlife tour today in this VERY unusual








Orca Whales and Wildlife Are Our Only Business. ©

Transient Orcas AND Clean Up Money $$

Near San Juan Island, in the Strait of Juan De Fuca, Yesterday Transient Orca Whales were seen in the PM. Transients Orca Whales where also reported in the area of Port Angeles and Victoria BC - said to be between 15 and 20 animals.


On to the next topic - did you see this?
Oil executives donate millions for stormwater pollution cleanup across Washington
Top executives with refineries in Washington earned $40 million in 2009
April FOOLS!!!!
OLYMPIA - In a surprise move, top executives of the companies that refine oil in Washington state have agreed to donate their 2010 salaries and bonuses to the cleanup of toxic stormwater pollution.

This is a welcome reversal as oil companies have vociferously opposed legislation to increase the Hazardous Substance Tax during the 2010 state legislative session. They have argued that cleanup of the millions of gallons of petroleum pollution that washes into Puget Sound each year should be paid for by someone other than the companies that profit from the product.

“To say this is unexpected is a bit of an understatement,” said Kurt Fritts, Executive Director of Washington Conservation Voters. “Oil companies have been saying all session that they want to clean up stormwater, just not through the Hazardous Substance Tax. Turns out they meant it.”

Echoing the structure of the legislation they opposed, the oil executives will set up a competitive grant process from their pooled salaries and allow local governments to apply for funding for clean water infrastructure. This will create thousands of construction jobs across the state. Anticipating environmental concerns regarding the short-term nature of such a funding source, executives have pledged to find a long-term solution, possibly dipping into the record profits many of them have been making.

2009 Oil Executive Salaries:
Tesoro: Bruce Smith $18.59 million
ConocoPhillips: James Mulva $10.44 million
BP: Tony Hayward $6.3 million
Shell: Peter Voser $4.7 million
Source: Forbes

CEO’s Bruce Smith (Tesoro) and James Mulva (ConocoPhillips) have earned a combined $187 million over a 5-year period. BP’s Tony Hayward received a 41% raise in 2009.

Please visit www.wcvoters.org for the full story.

At first blush it looks really good, but what does it mean long term?
Some say oil companies are trying to put aside a precident for clean up tax.
What does this mean long term?


Orca Whales and Wildlife Are Our Only Business. ©