Each spring, roughly a dozen gray whales known as the 'Sounders' break from the Pacific migration and slip into Puget Sound to root for ghost shrimp in the mudflats off Whidbey Island.
Their annual return has been logged since the early 1990s, and it anchors the natural calendar behind every seattle edmonds whale watching tour that leaves the Edmonds waterfront.
Edmonds began as a shingle-mill town, incorporated in 1890 on the timbered bluffs above the water. The mills are long gone. The marina at 459 Admiral Way now fronts a working harbor, where ferries cross to Kingston and pleasure craft share the channel with commercial boats. From these docks, vessels push out into the Salish Sea, the wider body of water that binds Puget Sound, the Strait of Juan de Fuca and the San Juan Islands into one interconnected marine system.
The waters hold two very different whales. The Southern Resident killer whales — the fish-eating orcas of the J, K and L pods — follow chinook salmon through the summer, their movements studied since the Center for Whale Research began photo-identification in 1976. Alongside them travel Bigg's orcas, mammal hunters whose numbers have climbed as seal and sea-lion populations recovered. A single puget sound whale watching cruise may also cross minke whales, harbor porpoise, Steller sea lions and bald eagles working the same rich currents.
Naturalists aboard these edmonds whale watching cruises read the water the way earlier generations read tide tables, noting blows, fin shapes and the direction of a foraging line. Much of what they share draws on decades of regional research, including the hydrophone networks that now listen for orca calls across the Sound. To join one of the seattle edmonds whale watching tour tours today is to enter that long record of observation, where each sighting adds another line to a marine history the region has kept for well over a century.
5 hr
