With tails the size of your living room slapping the water as they dived, a pair of humpback whales visited the Strait of Juan de Fuca off Port Townsend and Sequim-Dungeness on Monday.
Huge, majestic humpbacks are rarely seen in the Strait or in Puget Sound.
The spouting whales stopped occasionally to feed.
Humpbacks eat tiny crustaceans called krill, plankton and small fish, including herring.
The whales can grow to 50 feet long and weigh 45 to 50 tons — and they eat up to 5,500 pounds of food a day.
Pete Schroeder, a marine mammal veterinarian who lives in Dungeness, said he last saw the whales about 8 miles north of Dungeness.
“They were definitely humpbacks,”‘ Schroeder said during a telephone interview Monday night.
