I Spy, With My Little Eye...

Some more things crossed off my bucket list!!

Let's see:
I went whale watching. I didn't get seasick while whale watching. (Unlike last time.)
I got roaming charges because I was in Canadian waters. (Not on my list, but it happened anyway.)
San Juan Islands: check.

Let's play a little "I Spy", only it's not like the I Spy books. Not as cool, but my photoshop skillz aren't that stellar, and also it would ruin the pics because it would be out of context.

I spy, with my little eye (from left to right, top to bottom):

Mt. Baker from a boat, and tiny islands from another (bigger) boat (also known as a WSDOT ferry). Speaking of which, we almost missed the ferry. We saw the cars begin to load from about a mile away as we rounded the curve (we left in plenty of time, but got distracted by road tunes and a quest for Dairy Queen confetti cake freezee (or whatever they're called) and got a little pinched for time. He parked while I paid, and by then almost all the cars were on the ferry. We ran and ran and I was dropping things and Ridj ran behind me picking them up and it was like we were in a movie.

I'm pretty sure they held the ferry for us but I'm so glad they did - so we got a Ferry Happy Ride Thereafter, just like characters in a movie would.

I also spy: a Steller sea lion on Whale Rocks. Stellers are HUGE, by the way. This guy was "adolescent" and was probably still about 8 feet long. Later, we spied one tear apart a mud shark, and we were about 50 feet away (we almost ran over it as it tried to gulp the whole thing down in one piece). Stellers aren't snakes and they have the inconvenience of needing to breathe so it wasn't quite that easy, but the whole thing was gone in under two minutes. Impressive.


Then harbor seals, which I can actually see better in this picture than I could in real life (thank you, zoom),  a bald eagle on a private island, not in its nest (which is the huge mass of sticks); a lighthouse framed by crazy ribbon currents;

Now see if you can see the tiniest bit of whale or porpoise in these pictures. The porpoises were super cute but they're really fast so I'm not actually sure I caught any on camera. Actually, the frustrating thing was that I wasn't sure if it was a wave I was seeing or a porpoise until after the porpoise had gone back under.

My little eye didn't spy one tiny speck of a killer whale, which was kind of the point of going whale watching, but I did see a Minke whale.  Sometimes killer whales hunt Minke whales, even though Minke whales are about the same size. 

We watched it go up and down for about 45 minutes.

And now: which of the following 3 large shots do you think is the most striking?