Luna Update

Sunday, October 9, 2005
GOLD RIVER, BC — Maybe one of the reasons people respond to Luna with so much affection is that he seems to have such a zest for life. It’s probable that all orcas are like this, but most of them are a bit more distant from people than Luna is, so maybe we don’t see as much of the play. And Luna sure does play.

Last week, for instance, Luna spent a lot of time with a tug that he has often played with in the past. The tug has recently been towing large rafts of logs across Nootka Sound from one log sort area to another. When towing it moves quite slowly but with a substantial output of power, and Luna seems to like this. When we saw him he was mostly playing around the bow, sometimes rubbing against the tug’s rough hull. But often he would do something we’d heard about before but didn’t quite believe. Now we’ve seen it, and it’s true.

What he does is simple, but not quite what one would expect. He comes up to the bow of the tug, where there’s a large sawtooth-shaped steel leading edge, designed to help the tug get a grip on logs. These blunt teeth get a good grip on a whale, too. Luna rolls on his back, puts his flukes up against the teeth, and just lies there, pointing forward, letting the tug push him along. Sometimes he does this when he’s upright in the water, too, but usually it’s upside down, showing his white belly, with his pec fins sticking part way out of the water as if to prove that he’s doing no work at all. Sometimes when he’s lying there on his back, moving along at the tug’s sedate speed, he blows bubbles, which come frothing up around his upper body. Who knows what he’s thinking about, but it sure looks like fun.

While Luna wasn’t occupied with the tug, he kept busy elsewhere. He’s still spending time in the Gold River area, though his visits to the dock are few. When he’s been at the dock he has spent time pushing parked gillnet boats and other boats, mostly by rubbing on their hulls. We aren’t aware of any damage that’s been caused, and we asked one of the fishermen about that. He said that Luna hadn’t given him any trouble, and had just played for a while with a hose that was running over the side. We also saw Luna shepherding a large purse seine boat that was in the sound surveying the fishery for DFO. The operators of that boat also told us that they did not have problems with him.

One of the people who work in the area said that Luna spent most of one night resting beside one of the larger working boats. The skipper, who often sleeps aboard, woke occasionally to the sound of Luna’s measured breath just outside the window.

Luna would have good reason to rest. He had very active days. On one of them, he started off by working during the night and early morning hours with a loading operation conducted at a log sort by a huge barge that hauls logs from Nootka Sound to destinations up and down the BC coast. This operation is very active, with lots of splashing and the roaring of engines, and involves cranes lifting bundles of logs from the water onto the barge, supported by dozer boats that dash around below the cranes, moving bundles into their reach. We haven’t seen this, but we’ve been told that Luna loves this activity, bustling from dozer boat to log bundle, and sometimes shoving the bundles around himself.

After the barge was loaded, Luna followed it out of the Gold River area west down the Sound for miles, and apparently got all the way back to his familiar territory, many miles from Gold River. That morning he was heard making calls on the hydrophone in the area. But he didn’t stay long. Another tug that he enjoys came past towing yet another of his favourite tugs, which had been disabled during an operation some distance away. Luna hopped into the wake of this combination, and we saw him still porpoising along with the two boats an hour or two later, back up the Sound near Gold River.

He followed the two tugs all the way to one of the commercial docks in the Gold River harbour, where he alternately assisted and opposed the efforts of the towing tug’s crew to dock the disabled tug. Then when the job was done and the towing tug headed back out at speed, Luna hopped into that white wake and took off westbound again. Finally, two or three miles from the Gold River docks, he dropped off and did a little foraging. By now he'd covered 30 or 40 nautical miles of Nootka Sound already that day, so a salmon sandwich wouldn't have been out of order.

His enthusiasm for action didn’t diminish, though. We were watching from a distance in our Zodiac, and pretty soon he appeared to get an idea about something going on somewhere else, and he headed out in what looked like a very purposeful journey back up the sound toward Gold River. This time he did something we haven’t seen often: he slapped his tail frequently as he went. We started marking the slaps in a notebook, and counted 19. During this trip, he appeared to be headed directly for a small boat that was stopped in the sound. We thought he was going to try to interact with it, but he didn’t. He came charging up to it, slapping his tail as he went, then swam directly underneath it, and came up on the other side, still chugging along on the same precise heading he was steering on before, slapping away.

After another kilometer of this, he finally came to a sort of a stop, where he did some foraging, but his boating day wasn’t over. Shortly, along came the Uchuck III, which is also a favourite ship for him. He charged over to surf its ample wake, and rode it all the way to the Gold River docks.

At that point, the Kakawin Guardian boat came along and led him away from possible trouble at the dock. The guardians ushered him back out to an area where he seems to like to fish, and watched him go to work in the salmon fields. After they left him there, we got up on a nearby point of land and watched through binoculars as he foraged back and forth. A busy guy.

Source: ReuniteLuna.com

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