Orcas make splash in Dyes Inlet

By The Associated Press

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Hal Fergusson, who lives in Tracyton, a small town across the inlet from Bremerton, watched the show Tuesday evening.

"They were breaching. Seven of them came up all at one time," he said. "The big one was flapping his flipper on the water."

Dozens of people crowded a nearby boat launch, gawking as the whales' black fins knifed through the water. Many recalled a similar scene in the fall 1997, when 19 orcas swam into Dyes Inlet — a pocket of Puget Sound about 12 miles west of Seattle — and hung out for a month, feasting on a healthy run of chum salmon.

The crowds of shoreline whale watchers grew yesterday , and Kitsap County commissioners quickly passed an ordinance to protect the orcas, limiting boats and personal watercraft speeds to 7 mph and prohibiting wakes until June 28.

Dave Ellifrit, a whale researcher at the Center for Whale Research, which is based at Friday Harbor on San Juan Island, said the visiting whales were most likely seal-eating "transients" — unlike the fish-eating members of a resident pod that showed up nearly seven years ago.

"It can't be J Pod," Ellifrit told The Sun newspaper of Bremerton.

Whale experts believe the two other pods that reside in Washington's waters, K and L, are out in the ocean, where they normally spend winters before returning here around the beginning of June. The group that hung out in Dyes Inlet in 1997 came from L Pod.

"I still haven't seen any pictures to say for sure who they are," Ellifrit told The Associated Press yesterday.

According to Ellifrit, there have been as many as 15 transients in inland waters this week, swimming in various groupings. Early last year, a group of transients spent about two months in Hood Canal.

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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