After about 34 years seeking out whale species found in Puget Sound and the Strait of Juan de Fuca, Peter Hanke has become deft at finding them.

Hanke owns Puget Sound Express, a whale watching charter founded in 1985. The company operates two tour boats out of Port Townsend that spend the spring, summer and fall hauling tens of thousands of people out to see the sea creatures in their habitats.

“You learn what their feeding habits are, and you just start checking out different areas,” Hanke said.
Hanke figures he has about a 98 percent success rate when he searches for whales.

Another way to find whales out on the open water is to coordinate with the many other whale watching companies that operate in the area.

“We are all on the same radio frequency,” Hanke said. “We have our own private repeater system setup. It is like a taxi cab service, so all of the captains can just pick up a mic and talk to anybody else.”

Getting ready
The Red Head and the Glacier Spirit, the two boats operated by the company, are undergoing repairs in preparation for the coming season.

“We could actually run year-round if we wanted to,” Hanke said. “But it is kind of like ski companies. At some point, you’ve got to turn the chair off and grease the wheels.”

Once the repairs are made, the boats will be ready to get back out on the water.

“The spring is the kickoff for our season,” said Sarah Hanke, Puget Sound Express director of sales. “It is the only time of year that the gray whales come in, and we have a dozen gray whales that come off the coast in March and April, and then they move on to Alaska. We are one of the rare areas in the Northwest to see gray whales, and then they will move on. Then it will transition into orcas and humpbacks.”

The southern resident killer whales, which spend the spring, summer and fall months in the Salish Sea, are not as easy to find as they are listed as an endangered species by the federal Environmental Protection Agency.

“There are 74 southern residents and 140 other orcas besides those particular whales,” Hanke said. “So, most of what we see, probably 90 percent of what we see on our trips is these other animals. We really don’t see these southern residents.”

From 1973 to 2016, the resident killer whale population showed both periods of growth and decline. When the first population census was conducted in 1973, 66 whales were sighted, according to the EPA.

Their population increased to a high of 98 in 1995, then to 82 between 1995 and 2003, prompting the American and Canadian governments to list them as endangered species.

As of December 2016, there were 78 southern resident killer whales in the Salish Sea.

The numbers of other whale species appear to have been increasing, Hanke said.

“In the last 10 years, it has exploded with whales here,” Hanke said. “We see a lot of whales. We see a lot of humpbacks and gray whales. I actually think the food source of the Salish Sea is exploding. We are seeing more seals, more sea lions, more krill that humpbacks feed on. You get the doom-and-gloom stuff, but really what I think is going on is the whole ecology of the Salish Sea is really picking up. It is good news.”

Hanke said salmon remain a serious problem

“We still aren’t getting the salmon thing down, and that is what is going to affect the southern residents,” Hanke said.

Killer whales rely on healthy populations of salmon, particularly chinook, which are declining across the Salish Sea, according to the EPA.

Other potential factors for the decline in the killer whale population are linked to threats such as toxic pollution and noise and disturbance from boat traffic, according to the EPA.

“As far as the noise, and the vibration, what we really need to do is make sure all of us are really careful around the southern residents, but that we are still there so that we are not allowing these whales to kind of motor into Puget Sound and just get run over by freighters and tug boats and private boaters,” Hanke said.

Boats buffer whales
The tour boats act as a buffer between the whales and other commercial and private boaters in the area who may not otherwise be aware of the presence of the whales, Hanke said.  

“One of the things that people on shore don’t realize is you can’t see whales very easily,” Hanke said. “You don’t see black fins, and you aren’t necessarily looking for them, and zoom, you go right over the top of them,” Hanke said. “So, when we are around these groups of whales, we are the police on the water. If I am approaching a group and there is a boat that scoots by me, I will go ahead and call up to” warn about the presence of whales.

Christopher Lewman, captain of the Red Head, said a trained eye can identify the whales as far out as a quarter mile.

“They move all over the place,” Lewman said. “They don’t really seem to mind too much. We try to monitor all of our legalities and distances. We have range finders that we use. We practice with them. The range finders are handy. After a while, you can get a good sense of judgment because sense of distances is quite different out on the water. It looks totally different.”
 
An industry in recovery
In 2018, the whale watching business took a hit from media reports about southern resident deaths, Hanke said.  

“All the rhetoric about the southern residents is really affecting our business worldwide,” he said. “We had the orca mother that was pushing her calf around, and that was front-page news. Then we had another whale die. All of that really mounted, and now this particular year, as our pre-bookings are coming in, we are seeing it level back off.”

There is potential state legislation that would impact whale watching companies, Hanke said.

“The current proposal is to push us back 650 yards, which is close to half a mile, and at that point, we won’t be very close to them, and it will be very hard to work with them in terms of protecting them from other boats,” he said.

Hanke said the whales are healthy, and sightseers are almost guaranteed to see them on a whale watching tour.

“We don’t want to be painted as villains of the sea for whale watching,” he said. “We are hauling tens of thousands of people, literally, every year. We have naturalists on board that are standing up front in all the different boats, and they are talking about the whales.”
 
Growing up with whales
Hanke has been around the whales since the 1960s and said he has a tremendous respect for them.

“I pretty much grew up with them as I was on my dad’s sailboat in the ’60s,” he said. “The fishermen would fish on the west side, and they would shoot at the whales with shotguns to scare them away because they wanted to eat the salmon. So if you were sailing and it was quiet, you could figure out where the whales were by the shotgun blasts and then you could sail over.”

Hanke, originally from the Yakima area, moved to Port Townsend in 1983 and founded his tour boat company, Calm Sea Charters, two years later.

“I started doing sport fishing trips out to the fishing bank out here,” Hanke said. “We also did diving trips. I haven’t dove in a long time. We actually dove around the jetty, too.”

In the first years of his business, Hanke was the only employee. Today, the company has up to 30 employees during the season and operates four boats in Puget Sound, two in Port Townsend.

These days, the boats almost exclusively focus on whale watching tours, although other services are offered.

“We do group events as well,” Hanke said. “We work with Marine Science Center out here at Fort Worden. We do bird watching trips to Protection Island. We do dinner charters. We do team-building exercises out of Edmonds.”

In Port Townsend, the Red Head offers four-hour excursions. The Glacier Spirit, currently undergoing a massive facelift at Boat Haven, is a scheduled passenger ferry that provides transportation to Friday Harbor.

“We are a licensed ferry operator, and what we have done is turn the trip into a whale watch as well as a trip up to Friday Harbor,” Hanke said. “We’ve been doing that trip since 1994. It is probably one of the most popular products we have. If you are living in Sequim and you have relatives visiting from Minneapolis and you want to get rid of them for the day, put them on that trip. And they have a great time.”

For more information about available tours, call 360-385-5288 or visit www.pugetsoundexpress.com.