Program aims to boost whale safety
System alerts boats in Salish Sea of sightings
SEATTLE — Photographer Matt Mcdonald had lived on Puget Sound for years but had never seen a whale, so he was elated when he spotted a giant marine mammal just off Seattle’s waterfront one evening.
The excitement was short-lived. As Mcdonald tracked the whale in his camera’s viewfinder, a state ferry that dwarfed the animal came into the frame. The next morning he saw on the news that the humpback whale had died in the collision he witnessed.
“I still remember the moment of when they crossed paths and my heart just sinking like, ‘Oh my God, the ferry just ran over the whale,’” he recalled of the 2019 encounter. “I wish there was something I could have done.”
Now, five years later, there is.
The U.S. Coast Guard has launched a pilot program to alert ships of whale sightings in Washington state’s Salish Sea.
The program, which began official operations in December, comes at a time when visits by humpback whales and sea mammal-hunting orcas increase as their populations rebound.
Fed by the Pacific Ocean, the Salish Sea is a maze of islands and canals that make up the inland waters between Washington state and British Columbia, including Puget Sound. Two groups of orcas as well as baleen whales cruise the waters and are often visible from Seattle’s shoreline.
But these waters are also home to major American and Canadian ports, and nearly 300,000 vessels crisscrossed the area in 2023, from commercial container ships to cruise ships to ferries, according to the Coast Guard. That doesn’t include private crafts.
The new whale desk reduces the risk of collisions by combining sightings by mariners and civilians on whale-watching apps and data from underwater listening devices into an integrated system that will send out alerts to commercial vessels and regional ferries through a mobile app.
“We’re focusing on empowering the ship operators with the situational awareness … so they’re able to slow down pre-emptively, perhaps give a little bit of a wider berth to an area with a recently reported whale,” said Lt. Commander Margaret Woodbridge, who manages the whale desk.
People who spot whales can download one of two apps that will feed into the Coast Guard’s Puget Sound Vessel Traffic Service. Mariners can use radio frequencies and a phone tip line when they spot whales.
“The amount of sightings now that we get on any given day is incredible,” said Kevin Bartoy, chief sustainability officer for Washington state ferries. “We can know essentially where a whale is at any time.”