An Orca Stuck in the Mud

At low tide today the highway was lined with cars and concerned citizens sporting binoculars and cameras. They’d been following news of three orcas traveling through the Hood Canal, heading toward the town of Union. The orcas that travel into the Canal are Bigg’s (formerly called “transient”) orcas and eat marine mammals. Seals are plentiful here.

I’d received the alert from the Orca Network that morning and largely ignored the activity. I was waiting for a delivery I had to sign for so couldn’t leave the house. And after living here for 8 years, I knew I’d never see orcas in my part of the canal west of town along the shore where the Skokomish River’s tributaries flow through an estuary forming Annas Bay at high tide, and exposing mudflats and oyster beds at low tide.

Then shortly after 12:30 my neighbor left a voicemail telling me there was an orca near the shore less than half a mile away. A few minutes later my husband called. He and our two employees, who are currently working for that neighbor, were on the beach observing the orca who was unmoving in the the river channel. The water in the river channel was about four feet deep—too shallow for her dorsal fin to go underwater, while the tide was at 2 feet and rising. They could hear her cry out.

I was watching through binoculars at home and passed them over to the delivery driver so he could get a glimpse of the unusual sight. Our employees headed back to work, and dropped Kevin off at home. I grabbed my camera and together Kevin and I walked down the highway watching the orca, who seemed to have freed herself (we could tell it was a female by the short length of her dorsal fin) into a deeper channel, and was swimming backward, unsuccessfully trying to find a way out.

Soon we joined a dozen or so people on the highway shoulder, waiting for the tide to rise high enough to release her, waiting to watch her swim away unharmed by her ordeal. Waiting and worrying, waiting and wondering, waiting and believing that all would be okay.

Looking through my camera lens for more than an hour, I observed her stillness and patience. No wild thrashing. Just occasional deliberate movements when she must have sensed a change in the water levels and the pressure against her body.

Several us breathed a sigh of relief when she was finally free at 1:55 p.m. and swam swiftly away to be reunited with her pod. So grateful that the tide was going in, not out, and a major crisis avoided. All of us wishing her well before we turned and headed toward home.

Later at home I read the posts about the incident on Facebook and learned that the whale we’d been watching was T99, known as Bella, matriarch of her own pod with several children. She found the two members of her pod who’d been traveling with her and soon they were headed north into deeper waters.

Thanks for sharing the adventure with us.