What a morning! What a surprise! Orcas! Even before the morning wake-up call, we encountered orcas. We thought it was a small group, but after a while we noticed a series of killer whales blowing in the distance, then another group and so on… The pod we were watching could easily have been composed of 18 animals, adults and young, and very young. Males and females. We slowly followed them for a while, definitely modifying our early morning plans. Our whale expert, Dr. Andy Szabo informed us about their lives, their behavior and their food tastes. These animals were of the fish-eating groups, the so-called residents. Big pods compose these animals. Their behavior showed us that they were capturing their food, big salmon.
Whales were more interesting than breakfast, which at last was attended to. And to top it off, the day was perfect, with hardly any clouds, and sunny. Definitely not Alaska weather!
Eventually we entered Freshwater Bay and made our way to Pavlof Harbor. Here we separated in different groups of hiking, kayaking, and touring along the nearby coast on our expedition landing craft. The show point of the morning was the falls and the lake at the top. These falls and the river are a very important natural salmon hatchery, important to humans as well as the bears. For humans, because when the salmon are running big, on some years the fish authorities use a weir to capture a certain number of salmon, which are counted and their species determined, and let go. With this information, and with that of other salmon rivers, the commercial catch for next year can be correctly determined.
After lunch we sailed for Chatham Strait again, and proceeded on to the north, to our next day’s destination, the Inian Islands, but not before seeing another group of orcas travelling north also, and a youngster breaching!
If this was not enough, shortly after we were surrounded by a pod of Dall’s porpoise, considered to be the fastest cetacean in the world, hitting up to 30 or more knots!
