Orphaned killer whale receives boat ride home

ABOARD THE CATALINA JET -- An orphaned killer whale that strayed into western Washington's Puget Sound, where she quickly won friends and sympathy with her antics, was headed Saturday to what scientists hoped would be a family reunion in the waters off Canada.

The 2-year-old orca was lifted by crane from a pen Saturday morning and lowered into a blue tank on the deck of a high-speed catamaran.

Saturday afternoon, she was riding through cool, misty weather on a 400-mile voyage to Canada's Johnstone Strait, near the north end of Vancouver Island, where members of her pod had been spotted.

The 12-foot orphan, named A-73 for her birth order in Canada's "A" pod, or family group of orcas, had spent at least six months in Puget Sound, often swimming beside the Seattle-area passenger ferries. Scientists captured her last month to treat her health problems and then to attempt to reunite her with her pod.

The little orca chirped a few times during the transfer Saturday but quickly settled down in the tank mounted on the catamaran's stern.

Whale handler Jeff Foster and his crew covered her upper body with wet towels and slathered her dorsal fin and the skin around her blowhole with ointment to keep her skin moist. During the 340-mile journey up the Inside Passage between Vancouver Island and the west coast of British Columbia, Foster and crew took turns petting and talking to the orca to comfort her.

"She's a very calm animal. And at that age they're very adaptable," said handler Jen Schorr, 30, of Seattle. "They're pretty bold in most cases. They're the top predator, so they can afford to be."

U.S. and Canadian officials arranged the relocation in hopes that the juvenile orca would rejoin her family group.

Pods from A-clan whose vocalization patterns are similar to A-73's, have been in the area for weeks, and her grandmother's group, A-24, was spotted there Thursday.

Even if she does not, the consensus is she will fare better there than in the busy water near Seattle, where her health faltered as she struggled alone to feed herself from mid-January until her capture on June 13.

"These are the waters where she grew up, and fish she knows how to catch," said Marilyn Joyce, marine-mammal resource coordinator for Canada's Department of Fisheries and Oceans.

Orca experts noted the disappearance and likely death of A-73's mother last year, and believe she wandered south to the Seattle area because she was unable to keep up with the rest of the group.

Wildlife officials worried as the orca grew friendly with boaters around the Vashon Island ferry dock in busy Puget Sound, even scratching herself on the hulls of small boats and raising the threat that she could upset a small craft as she grew.

Now that her health problems have been cleared up, and her weight increased to 1,348 pounds, the Vancouver Aquarium will oversee her care in a net pen near Hanson Island until the release.

"If her pod comes by tomorrow, and they vocalized and were positive, we could release her tomorrow ... open the door and cross our fingers," said David Huff of the Vancouver Aquarium.

Killer whales, actually a species of dolphin, live in all the world's oceans. Resident populations on both sides of the U.S.-Canada border feed on fish, while transient coastal populations live on other marine mammals. Both groups face depleted salmon runs, growing ship traffic and pollution.