> 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.
>

I LOVE whales and dolphins, seeing them in the wild... and I have seen wild orcas, several years ago on a whale-watching trip out of Victoria (British Columbia, Canada, on the West Coast, etc.).

We were in an inflatable heavy-duty motorboat-thing, no cover, no walls, just the 3-foot-high roll of inflated tough fabric containing the air between us and the ocean on the sides. We found three orcas... a mother, a calf, and a BIG male. We watched them from required 'safe distance' for quite a while, and went "ooooh" and "aaaah" and "this is way better than Sea World" at them.

Then we saw a BIG dorsal fin heading for us. It was the male, and we didn't move, just sat there watching it in semi-shock. The male came RIGHT up to the boat, and before he would have run into us, he rolled over on his back and went not three feet UNDER THE BOAT. We could feel the movement in the water under the boat, and we realized how VERY large this whale was... and that he could probably capsize our little boat rather easily if he so chose.

But of course he didn't, and it was SO COOL to see a wild orca *that close*. The guide said he'd never seen anything like it in his years of leading whale-watching expeditions.

That and the time in Alaska when a big humpback whale spouted RIGHT next to the boat are the coolest whaley moments evar.

Sosi"ooooh"qui