Our morning began a little slowly today, as we tried to recover from the effects of the long drive yesterday and the loud town noises outside our window last night. We stumbled down to our breakfast, and while eating noticed that our hotel had beach cruiser bikes, similar to what we had used for our wedding, available for guest use. We decided that a bike tour of Friday Harbor would be a fun way to begin our stay on the island, so after finishing up, we hopped on the bikes and headed into town. What we hadn’t counted on was the island being quite so hilly, or our bikes being set up with a gear more appropriate for the flats of Indiana. The single gear was so hard that even pedaling in the few flats we found wasn’t easy, so we found ourselves grinding our way up every hill at a snails pace. Even more troubling was how weak the coaster brake in the rear was, as each downhill became a struggle to avoid a high speed crash. Worst of all, we didn’t really become aware of the full extent of the problem until we were on a six mile scenic loop, and we were too stubborn to give up on our imagined “pleasant coastal ride” until we were nearly halfway through the loop. Deciding that we might as well finish the loop, we continued on, priding ourselves at least on our ability to pass a small family of fellow hotel guests who had made the same mistake. They were walking their bikes up a particularly steep hill, which we disdained to do, confident in our bike riding prowess. Of course, three quarters of the way up the hill Steven’s chain popped off the bike from too much strain. We then got to watch as the small family happily walked past us, mounted their bikes, and rode off while Steven struggled to fix his bike.

The Zodiac

With our bike ride complete, we decided to try out one of the whale watching tours the island is famous for. We opted for the tour on the smaller boat after learning that this was the “adventure” tour; we would have to wear wet suits and would be tearing around the ocean at high speed. We left our larger camera behind because we had been informed that we would get a lot of water sprayed on us, and everything we didn’t want to get wet had to be stashed under our wetsuits. When we arrived at the tour company our excitement mounted as we found that we would be wearing not wetsuits but cold water survival suits. The suits were huge. They covered us from ankle to neck and contained inflation compartments along with areas that could retain body heat. Our boat for the adventure was a Zodiac similar to what is used by the Coast Guard. Steven and I were chosen to sit in the front of the boat; which was the adventurous seat in which we would get sprayed and jostled “like a cowboy”. We took an hour long boat ride around the islands to get to a prime location for the whales. The scenery, as we are finding on our travels, was stunning. The boat zipped along at extremely fast speeds but in our monkey suits we felt safe. We did not, however, get even get a drop of water on our suits by the time we reached the Canadian border. At this point the suit had managed to retain every drop of sweat inside and became less of a novelty.

Boats are required to stay about 100 yards away from the Orcas, but the Orcas are 25 feet long and are well seen from the distance. It was pretty cool to see the whales coming up to take breaths and then diving again. We soon learned that you could tell the females and males apart, as the males have much larger dorsal fins. After a while we even got to see several young Orcas playing, with one even breaching out of the water several times. Our naturalist guide told us all sorts of interesting information about the whales: this particular pod only eats salmon, for instance, and that the population of whales in the San Juan islands was almost wiped out in the seventies because of capturing for aquariums until it was discovered how small the population actually is (there are only about 150 Orcas in the area). It was also interesting to see that she could identify all the individual whales with just a glance from the distance, based on their dorsal fins and markings. This allowed her to give us a quick history of all the animals we were seeing. Grandma, the matriarch of the pod, is 99 years old right now, and still going strong.

After drifting along with the whales for an hour and a half or so, we turned and headed back for shore. Along the way we stopped by several small islands that were wildlife preserves to catch some glimpses of harbor seals and bald eagles. Once back on the wharf, we gratefully pulled off our sweat soaked suits, feeling sorry for the next user, and headed off to explore the island some more.

We used our hotel map to wander the island in our car. Being the navigator was a bit frustrating until I realized our map was not to scale but was a Disney World type of map. Exhausted, we decided to head back to the Bird Rock.

Off to snooze,

Orca observing Steven and Still dry in my survival suit Libby

Travel question of the day: How much trouble is the guy in that was using the whale watching binoculars to check out a bikini clad woman on a yacht while sitting in the zodiac with his wife and mother and father in law?