Orcas

There were two types of whales in the Telegraph Cove area when we were up there. One was the Orca or Killer Whale (although they are technically dolphins and not whales, though the particulars of such categorization are somewhat lost to me) which we saw quite a few of on our first day out.

 The orcas are divided into 3 groups: transients which move around a lot and hunt marine mammals, residents which are more local and eat fish, and offshore which are the least understood and believed to eat sharks. Of the three, most of the animals we saw were residents although there were some transients in the area. This particular female was `porpoising` her way along, breaching repeatedly and in a hurry to get places. She was tricky to predict so while she was spectacular to see leaping, this was the best picture I was able to get.

 We did manage to get ridiculously close to them though as a pair passed directly under our boat while we were watching some other groups and spouted immediately after passing the boat. The shot below is actually not cropped in any way as I had a fairly telephoto lens on my camera and this one was perhaps 5 feet away from us.

We`ve seen orcas before and had some particularly incredible encouters already, but this was an incredible set of sightings to rival all the others we`ve had.