2006-03-21T08:51:00.001-08:00

Jpod has been in the area for the past few days with a sighting on Wednesday March 15th late afternoon near Race Rocks. They were feeding against the incoming flood tide and slowly worked their way out to the south of Race Rocks. On March 17th they were reported offshore of San Juan Island at 7:30am. I raced up to the hill with my spotting binoculars and found them on the north side of Discovery Island. They were headed west and I was able to help Ken Balcomb and Dave Ellifrit from the Centre for Whale Research get to them in order to take some ID shots. They did not see the whole pod as they were quite spread out.
I had a 1200 trip with Prince of Whales on an open boat and found them west of Constance Bank extremely spread out and feeding. I did not find the whole pod either. There may have been a subpod further west. It's a good sign to see that the fish are starting to show up. I've been talking with the sport fishing guides and they have been doing well lately. We may start seeing more of Jpod over the next few weeks. Usually by May we are seeing them almost every day and by the end of May Kpod and Lpod are back from their winter feeding offshore. We had a report on March 18th from the Macarthur II (U.S. research ship) that they had Jpod near Clallam Bay and spent the day with them as they headed out the Juan de Fuca and watched them feeding off the Nitinat Canyon. They could hear them acoustically until 22oohrs and were off of Swiftsure Bank headed south.
On March 19th after dark the Macarthur II heard Lpod calls over the hydrophone 13 miles off the Olympic Peninsula (near LaPush). Maybe J's met up with them for an early spring fling.
I expect that we will see Jpod soon back in the interior waters. At least parts of Kpod and Lpod showed up in Puget Sound from March 4th to March 8th. This was the earliest documented visit from them.