I was walking to work today, following the path that I normally take. When I passed the marina I saw a ship docked with a semi parked next to it. Only this was not an ordinary ship, it looked like an old sailing ship from 4 centuries ago.

I stopped to take some pictures of it. There was a man next to me taking pictures as well. He told me that the ship came up from Mexico. His friend in Mexico had posted a picture of this ship on Facebook, and he had come to the dock to take some pictures of it arriving in Seattle.

It turns out that this ship is a school that the students sail.
It was really cool to see that today.

You can’t see it very well in the pictures (because they were shot with a camera phone at dusk on a moving ferry), but there’s a whale in the water. There were actually two of them.

This is the second time in two weeks when the ferry captain has announced to us that there are Orcas within viewing distance of the ferry. Last time, they were too far away to even wish to capture with my phone’s camera. This time, they were right outside my window. By the time I’d gotten my camera phone out, they were underwater. Then, they resurfaced back behind the ferry.

Its pretty nice though, having these whales sharing our commute. It makes us more aware, as we want to see them all the time. This morning, we thought we saw a whale by the side of the boat. Turned out it was just a sea otter (but that’s pretty cool, too).