Whale Watching Out of Rosario, Orcas Island

Day three in the San Juan Islands. What a crazy day! As I write I’m aboard the ferry Samish, the fourth boat I’ve been on today. Yesterday while in Deer Harbor we had decided to book a whale watching trip. The trip would leave from Rosario on Orcas Island, and was much cheaper than the ones leaving from Friday Harbor. Knowing that the Washington State ferry system has been a train wreck this year, we made sure to be on the 6:05 a.m. inter-island boat. It wasn’t even 7 when we disembarked in Orcas Village, and our cruise wasn’t until 12:30. When we got to Eastsound, the largest town on the island, the only thing open was the grocery store so we had to get our breakfast there. We spent the rest of the morning driving around the island. Orcas is my favorite island in the San Juans that you can drive to. It’s very quiet, wooded, and mountainous.

I know I said yesterday that Roche Harbor should be on your bucket list, but I would put Moran State Park near the top. I hadn’t been there since I was a kid, and I had forgotten how truly stunning it is. And what a gorgeous morning to see it! The whole park is a thick forest, with a few pristine mountain lakes. The road rises steeply from the entrance and climbs seemingly forever until you finally arrive at Mount Constitution, the highest in the islands. On top is a historic stone tower with incredible views over all the islands and across to Bellingham.

Our whale watching boat was a brutish 46-foot steel workhorse with twin 400 HP diesels. It’s smaller than the big boats out of Friday Harbor. Rosario is nowhere near the prime whale watching grounds on the west side of San Juan Island, so we had a lot of distance to cover. We went through the same islands we had traveled by yesterday and this morning, past Friday Harbor where we had slept, and well into Canadian waters before we found our humpback. It was actually a good chance for me to pay attention to different passages in the islands and see what they are like before attempting them in my Whaler. For example, with today’s extreme tides Cattle Pass was a total washing machine despite the calm winds. Near that pass are some rocks that have become a sea lion rookery, and we had a good look at them along with hordes of sea birds. When we found our whale, there were several other tour boats there. I recognized the more expensive ones that were watching the same whale I was. American tour boats have to fly a special whale tail flag while in Canadian waters; all the boats had one. We watched the leviathan breach several times. On the way home we came across a minke whale which was very hard to spot. The naturalists aboard were good and I learned a lot.

Our plan was to head to the ferry dock a couple of hours before our boat and have a nice dinner at the historic Orcas Hotel. When we arrived though, we learned that the MV Tillacum we had come in on had broken down. There were no more boats to Friday Harbor today! When I asked the lady if we had to sleep in our car, she quickly made special arrangements. Because we were hours early, she was able to book us to Anacortes. From there we would turn around, get back onto another ferry, and go all the way back to Friday Harbor. There would be no charge. It all went according to plan from there, except that we would have to eat our dinner from a vending machine. There would be no time in Orcas or Anacortes to eat, the onboard cafeterias were closed, and in Friday Harbor everything would be closed by the time we got back to our AirBnB. We took it all in stride. There are worse situations to be in than being forced to ride back and forth across the San Juan Islands on an absolutely gorgeous evening. By the end of the day we had spent seven hours on various boats, and most of the rest of the day was spent waiting for one. We are already getting to know these islands rather well.