DISCOVERY BAY — Seeing or hearing whales briefly rise, blow their spouts and slip stealth-like back into the deep is not too unusual in this shellfish-rich bay.
Capturing an extended whale visit on video is another thing.
“He was at least 30 feet long. It was pretty amazing,” Joe D’Amico recalled Friday from where he spotted the massive water mammal slowly breaking the surface.
D’Amico grabbed his video camera and quietly recorded the unusual close encounter with what appears to be a white-headed humpback whale on the video he uploaded late Friday to YouTube at www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-ttzs15L_o.
D’Amico, president of Security Services Northwest, was jogging late Thursday afternoon near his company’s Fort Discovery headquarters. He spotted a commotion out on the calm, glassy waters off the Contractor’s Point sand spit.
Salmon were jumping, gulls were lighting on balled-up schools of herring.
Then a wayward whale surfaced and slowly swam by, coming as close as 20 feet from the shallows around the spit that juts out from the bay’s western shoreline.
The whale swam from around the spit southward to another point south of where D’Amico stood.
“He was working his way back and forth. It was like he was patrolling,” D’Amico recalled.
———
Port Townsend-Jefferson County Editor Jeff Chew can be reached at 360-385-2335 or at jeff.chew@peninsuladailynews.com.
