Silly me for not waiting until the *end* of the week. I didn't think anything else would happen.

Sunday: Worked another 13 hour day. Towards the end of it, we were taking the empty boat out to pick up the returning hordes of tourists from this one island, when we received a radio call from one of the other ferries which was on a route further out.

They were in the middle of a pod of orca.

By the time we found out where exactly they were, they were in sight, and it wasn't very far out of our way. We were running very early and had lots of time before we needed to be where we were going, and nobody on board to complain about route deviations. So we went over there, three of us on a huge ferry, put it in neutral and just drifted around out there in the middle of Orca Central.

It was hard to estimate how many there were -- maybe six or seven. One was a baby, and one was an enormous male whose dorsal fin was about as high as me. (You can tell the sexes apart from the dorsal fin. Males have a tall, upright, triangular fin like a spike sticking out of their back, and females have a curved-over one more like that of a dolphin.) They were much bigger than you think of them as being. When they slid under the water it was like watching a submarine diving.

The first I saw of them was when one spouted. I didn't see the orca themselves until some time later, when four or five all came up to breathe at the same time. A few minutes later again, they all started heading towards us, and passed across our bow. I suppose they were around us for fifteen or twenty minutes, and we had the most amazing closeup views of them on the surface during that time. They weren't feeding or playing, or going anywhere in a hurry, just messing around. It was the most amazing thing ever.

As if that wasn't eventful enough for one day, one of the passengers on the trip back was wearing a Sluggy Freelance t-shirt. I told him I read Sluggy too, and talked to him for most of the trip. He was a comics-geek from Germany. He asked me what other web comics I read, and I said I only read Sluggy Freelance and Planet Earth And Other Tourist Traps. He hadn't heard of that, so I told him a bit about it and then did the whole "And I KNOW the guy who WRITES it! And I MET him at this Internet convention in the USA!" thing.

About an hour after the conversation, I thought back to some things he said, and realised he had assumed I meant a comics convention and Faux Pas was the guest of honour or something. If you start getting a lot of hits from Germany, that would be my doing.

Brunnen-"ok, NOW my week is over"G