Water Creatures

Toward the end of the summer we had one of our grandsons staying with us for several weeks and we took him whale-watching. We had hoped to see Orcas, but the three or four pods of Orcas that frequent Puget Sound had all headed out to sea. We did see, however, two Humpbacks and these pictures are all of them. They spent the time surfacing and diving every five or ten minutes. It was not the easiest to get pictures from the deck of a moving boat, and this are the best I was able to do. None of the pictures were worth posting alone, so I decided to put them together in a collage, but apologize for its deficiencies. I do so little editing of my photos that I had to find out on line how to put this together and that it is a rather amateurish attempt, I freely acknowledge. We left from Anacortes and were gone for nearly six hours, having had to travel quite a distance to investigate the reports of these two whales. We did see also some porpoises, a couple of Minke Whales, eagles, and sea lions, the latter at Mermaid Rock. All-in-all it was a great day and what the pictures lack in technical excellence they make up in preserving memories of the day. ronaldhanko-orchidhunter.blogspot.com/2011/11/whale-watch...

When our grandson was staying with us earlier this summer we took him whale-watching and saw quite a number of Killer Whales or Orcas. This is one that surfaced near the boat and this is the best picture I got on the trip. There are around 80 Orcas that are resident in Puget Sound and it is rare that a whale-watching tour does not find some of them. ronaldhanko-orchidhunter.blogspot.com/2013/08/whale-watching.html

Best viewed in a large size.

A wonderful place to explore at low tide.

Photographed at Clayton Beach. If I am not mistaken, this is the skeleton of the Eccentric or Pacific Sand Dollar or Biscuit Sea Urchin, Dendraster excentricus. ronaldhanko-orchidhunter.blogspot.com/2010/08/larrabee-st...

Taken on a whale-watching trip last summer (we saw whales as well). Mermaid Rock is a rock in Puget Sound where the Sea Lions gather and our boat stopped there briefly on our return trip. ronaldhanko-orchidhunter.blogspot.com/2011/11/whale-watch...

Because our ferry trip was aborted due to mechanical problems we missed the part of the trip that would have taken us to areas where we would have seen some of the fjords and glaciers of southeast Alaska. We decided instead to take a glacier and wildlife cruise out of Seward and had a wonderful time, though the day was very dull and cloudy. We saw Sea Otters, Sea Lions, Humpback Whales, Orcas, a Gray Whale, Porpoises, a lot of seabirds and also visited Holgate Glacier. This photo taken somewhere near the outside of Resurrection Bay, is my wife's.

The Giant Green Anemone grows all along the Pacific coast of the Americas from Peru to Alaska. It is one of the most spectacular animals to be found in the tide pools along the coast. This example was photographed on the Oregon coast near Yaquina Head. ronaldhanko-orchidhunter.blogspot.com/2012/07/oregon-coas...