In the summer, whale watching is a very nice day trip from Seattle. The easiest way is to board the Victoria Clipper to Friday Harbor at San Juan Islands. From there, whale watching tours are for your choosing. It is not a bad idea to spend the night at the Friday Harbor and make it a weekend get-away. For me, I simply lazed with the package deal from Victoria Clipper.
Watching the whales reminded me the Black Fish documentary. It is obvious that Killer Whales are pack animals. Pods stay together pretty much their entire lives and sometime even adopt orphans. Capturing one of them for exhibition or entertaining is unnatural and most likely cruel.
It dawned on me that all pack animal must communicate with each others and therefore establishing some kind of clan structure. We actually saw several pods interacting with each others. The tour guide speculating some kinds of mating activities are going on. That made perfect sense. To achieve reasonable genetic diversification, the pods must mate with members of other pods. This means Killer Whales must have social structures greater than clan and could somehow communicate to members of other pods. This is very cool.
We did not spend much time in Friday Harbor. It felt like a lovely little town. I don’t see much major tourist attractions, so the primary purpose is water activities, or just to relax and chill.