Yesterday at around 5:15 pm, The Stranger's chief technology officer Anthony Hecht and his family saw some orcas from a ferry from Bremerton. Which is totally unfair. How come I never see orcas when I take a ferry?
Anthony says the ferry shut off its engines while they waited for the orcas to go by. Even though there are only one or two in the above video, "I'm sure we saw five separate whales," he says. No word on whether these were southern residents or transients—but given the smallness of the group, it seems probable they're transients. Southern residents, the only endangered orcas in the United States, typically travel in larger groups.
Two unrelated facts about orcas and Washington State ferries:
• In 1970, the Washington State ferry was used to transport at least one orca captured off Whidbey Island to the Seattle waterfront. (It's possible all seven orcas were taken to Seattle that way.) The trip, in a flatbed truck parked there on the ferry in among all the other cars, provoked "considerable excitement and curiosity along the highway and among the ferry passengers," according to the book Puget Sound Whales for Sale.
• In 2014, a Washington State ferry went into service that is named after Lolita, the endangered orca at Miami Seaquarium. But the ferry is not named Lolita, it is named Tokitae. Tokitae, a Coast Salish greeting meaning "nice day, pretty colors," is the first name Lolita was given, before Miami Seaquarium renamed her. (They gave her a name that has a distinct connotation in Western civilization, thanks to Nabokov: Young girl who's going to be fucked.) Activists still prefer to refer to Lolita as Tokitae. The ferry Tokitae runs between Clinton and Mukilteo. Incidentally, that ferry was reportedly held up by orcas the day before the August commemoration of Tokitae/Lolita's capture (which I wrote about at the very end of this essay).
In closing, we live in the coolest place on the planet.
