Beam Reach students observed J pod

13 May 2008, Orca Network report:

J pod were found near the bottom of Rosario Strait.
Peter Hamilton, Lifeforce Founding Director
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The Beam Reach students/staff with Marla Holt aboard are with J pod as of 2:19 pm viewing breaches and tail lobs, but hearing no vocalizations. The pod is traveling around S. Lopez Island heading NW.
Scott Veirs, Beam Reach
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We saw J-Pod in Rosario Channel in three distinct groups slowly heading south. In the lead group was the very recognizable and distinctive ruffled dorsal fin of J-1 Ruffles, who was surrounded by 10-12 of his family clan, including his mom J-2 Granny. We watched them for awhile as they made slow, lazy surfacings with an occasional tailslap. Then we moved to watch the back group of whales which included J-22 Oreo, her two youngsters (Double Stuff and Cookie), as well as J27 Blackberry. This group was a bit more boisterous, with Blackberry pushing Doublestuff around on the surface a couple of times. Then J27 gave us a nice viewing of his belly as he swam upside down for a bit. The whales were spread out probably over 1 mile as they slowly made their way down the Strait.
John Boyd (JB), Marine Naturalist, Western Prince
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Beam Reach met up with J-pod about a nautical mile south of Bird Rocks in Rosario Strait between 2:00 and 2:30pm. We followed them south as they hugged the shore of Lopez Island in a rather spread out fashion. We observed lots of exciting surface behaviors such as pectoral slapping, tail slapping, breaches, half breaches and spy hopping. We had deployed a hydrophone array off the stern of our vessel, the Gato Verde, consisting of three hydrophones as well as a high frequency hydrophone, also off our stern. The whales were not vocalizing for at least 45 minutes when we first got to them, luckily, however, the pod became very acoustically active for a short period of time, emitting a large amount of echo location clicks, S1, S3, and S4 calls, and surprisingly, an unusual amount of whistles. They soon fell silent again and intermittently made echo location clicks and S1 calls. As the whale watching fleet slowly left the vicinity, the whales became more and more spread out and we left them at 5:30pm near the Salmon Bank buoy. They seemed to be milling non- directionally, though we got a message from Orca Spirit stating that they were slowly moving west when they left the scene at around 7:00pm.
Dominique, writing for Beam Reach