Transients visit Bremerton Silverdale

A group of at least five killer whales showed up in Bremerton Wednesday morning, exciting shoreline residents who watched the orcas as they wandered through Sinclair and Dyes inlets throughout the day.



These are transient orcas, the seal-eating variety. They travel quickly and quietly, searching the nooks and crannies of our inland waterways for marine mammals — even checking out Ostrich Bay near Bremerton’s Jackson Park.



Reports of the orcas began coming in around 10:30 a.m. Wednesday, when a group of three whales were sighted off Enetai near Manette. The animals swam into Sinclair Inlet and past Puget Sound Naval Shipyard, where they were spotted by a Sunn Fjord resident about 11:45. The orcas were soon headed out of the inlet, turning in front of the Bremerton Ferry Terminal.



“They were swimming past the Turner Joy,” said Leanna Christian, an employee of The Boat Shed restaurant on the northeast side of Port Washington Narrows. She saw them pass under the Manette Bridge shortly after 12:30 p.m., heading toward Dyes Inlet.



A short time later, the whales were reported by residents of Erlands Point, Tracyton and Chico. They swam up the middle of Dyes Inlet, perhaps as far as Anna Smith Children’s Park before turning back south, pausing near the end of Erlands Point, then ducking into Ostrich Bay about 3:30 p.m. They were still in the bay at 7:30 p.m., according to a shoreline resident.



Transient orcas, which are frequently seen in Southeast Alaska and along the shores of British Columbia, are quite distinct from the more familiar Southern Resident killer whales that eat fish — mostly chinook salmon— and frequent the San Juan Islands in the summer and Central Puget Sound in the fall.


In terms of their appearance, transients have a sharper, more sharklike, dorsal fin than resident orcas with their rounded fins. Also the gray “saddle patch” around the dorsal fin stretches farther forward on transients.



Sightings of transients in Puget Sound are unusually high this year, said Howard Garrett of Orca Network, which keeps track of whale sightings.



“They are all over,” Garrett said. “They are really patrolling these waters.”



The whales that came into Sinclair and Dyes inlets Wednesday may be the same ones spotted Tuesday morning off Point No Point in North Kitsap and near Vashon Island later in the day, Garrett said.



Ken Balcomb of the Center for Whale Research was able to identify several of those whales, including a 31-year-old male known as T-74, who is distinguished by a notch in his dorsal fin. Like many transients, T-74 has been observed mainly in Southeast Alaska.



Balcomb, who has maintained a census of Southern Residents for 35 years, confirmed that this seems to be an unusual year for visits by transients.



“It sure seems to me that we have had a real episode of transient activity in the last five months,” he said.



Balcomb speculated that the transients may be around more because the residents are somewhere else. The two types of whales seem to avoid each other. Since residents normally travel in greater numbers, they may hold the dominant position.



The fish-eating residents are not around, probably because they can’t find fish to eat, Balcomb said. On the other hand, “fisherman would probably agree that there are too many seals.”



The last time transient orcas were reported in Dyes Inlet was 2004, when 13 of the animals stayed for two days. T-74 was not among them. Shoreline residents at the time reported an unusual number of seals and sea lions climbing out of the water, either onto docks or high up on the beaches.