No Danger Of Orca Encounters While Rockin' The Trinity River In Fort Worth

No, what you are looking at here is not some sort of artist's rendering of what the Trinity River Central City Uptown Gator Island Vision Boondoggle's lake, mountain and flying fish may look like upon completion on a date far in the future.

No, every thing you see here is natural, except for those Blue Angel jets.

Natural.

Not the product of a pseudo public works project gone sideways and awry.

I saw what you see above on Facebook, via Kathy Schaefer Bressler, with a caption of "Only in Seattle".

Which would make that mountain the one known in Washington as The Mountain, but also known as Mount Rainier.

That big flying fish is what is known as an Orca.

Formerly known as a Killer Whale.

Calling this beautiful mammal a Killer Whale became politically incorrect way back in the 1960s, when it became widely realized that these fellow mammals were not killers of a danger to humans sort.

However, the salmon world might still refer to the Orca population as Killer Whales.

During that revolutionary decade of the 1960s, I think the guy's name was Ted Griffin, if I remember correctly, he made the majority of the people of Washington aware of the Orca pods for the first time, due to the bizarre fact that this man had hunts, in order to trap Orcas, to sell them to aquariums and places like Sea World.

Which is why the world knows the names Namu and Shamu.

Trapped Killer Whales were kept penned in Elliott Bay, in Seattle, awaiting extradition to the location of whoever purchased one of these mammals who should never have been for sale.

As you might imagine, this did  not go over well in the Pacific Northwest, ahead of the times even then, environmental protection issues wise, just as the Pacific Northwest is ahead of the times, in multiple ways, in 2015.

It was made illegal to hunt Orcas. And the Orca pods were protected in multiple ways. Such as the various pods being tracked, with a record kept of the number in the pod and baby Orcas being added. Or Orcas gone missing.

In all my years in the Puget Sound zone I had only one Orca pod encounter.

I was with my mom and dad, somewhere in the San Juan Islands. We were jigging for cod.

Suddenly, in the distance, an Orca jumped out of the water, such as you see above. Then another. Then many others. They were coming towards us. We were not moving. Soon there were dozens of Orcas around us. Some were small, some big.

I remember we did not feel any sense of being in danger. More a feeling of being in awe. Some of the Orcas slowed as they neared our boat, almost as if stopping to say hello.

Orcas are sort of like dolphins, in that up close they look as if they are smiling at you.

This Orca encounter pre-dated the modern era of always having event recording devices on ones person, in the form of a digital camera, phone or video camera. We had no camera on board. Not even of the antique using film sort.

So, that wonderful once in a lifetime experience of being surrounded by an Orca pod is recorded only in my memory, a location where I can still enjoy seeing it, but can not share, visually....