It was an early morning in Telegraph Cove, on the north end of Vancouver Island. It was the middle of summer so the sun had risen already, but it was overcast, so the sky was just a bright, seamless gray. Fog blanketed the view of distant islands, and mist surrounded the nearby waves. My mom and I were being gently rocked about by the ocean, sitting in our little rubber dingy a ways off the shore. We were giddy, loud with our excitement after having caught the first fish of the day so early- our laughter was in sharp contrast with the gentle quietness of the morning. Before too long, though, we quieted down, and cast our lines back out into the water beside the freshly-caught bleeding lingcod dangling by a rope through the gills. Its eyes stared up at the gray sky, glassy and bulging, while its mouth gaped, and teeth- white and jagged like stalactites- caught on the rope. Then, suddenly, there was a loud whoosh- and a towering black fin, nearly six feet tall, rose out of the water not far off the starboard side of our raft. It was probably further away than it seemed, but it left me breathless and more than a little afraid- the fin alone was nearly half the size of our rubber dingy- and another three or four killer whales had already surfaced and disappeared shortly after the first one.

My mom and I could only sit and watch as, for the next several minutes, a pod of over a dozen orcas passed through the cove. Every few seconds there would be that tell-tale whoosh, and a formidably sized black dorsal fin would rise from the water. Every now and then, one of them would heave at least half of their body out of the deep teal waves and into the air, either collapsing with a splash or gliding silently back into the water. For a while, the orcas seemed to be surfacing closer and closer to our dingy. One was even close enough that my mom and I could lean over the side and watch a murky silhouette beneath us- in water we had thought to be fairly shallow- drifting a ways before disappearing into the deep. The whales slowly vanished into the distance- after a while, we could no longer see dorsal fins emerging from the water, and shortly after that, the whoosh of sea spray vanished into the mist as well. It was just us, the gray sky and the blue-green waves in the early morning.