Social media was abuzz all month over the exploits of the southern resident killer whales. The endangered, salmon-eating southern residents were once a fixture in Washington State’s inland waters, but in recent decades, declining fish stocks have increasingly led them to forsake our waters. With each passing year, it becomes less and less accurate to call them “residents.” In fact, the southern residents have now largely been supplanted in the inland waters by the mammal-eating orcas formerly known as “transients.”

This month, the gloomy trend temporarily reversed. All three pods of southern residents returned to the inland waters, drawn home by a record-breaking autumn run of chum salmon. Orcas appeared in numbers and in places they had not been seen in decades, including L-pod’s first visit to Penn Cove in fifty years.

Penn Cove was the scene of a grisly roundup of more than eighty southern residents on a single day in 1970. Several of the orca calves were sold to aquariums to serve as performers, while several other orcas, calf and adult alike, died in the net-pens during the capture operation. Their carcasses were disposed of at sea. Partly as a result of this and other large-scale capture operations, today’s population of southern residents numbers just seventy-four individuals. Amazingly, one of the whales alive today is the ninety-six-year-old matriarch L25, who was present for the roundup in 1970. This month, L25 led her family back into Penn Cove for the first time since that terrible day.

Orcas of any description attract fans on social media, but the southern residents are particularly beloved. The internet was going crazy to see so many return. This was no ordinary, brief foraging expedition. The whales kept a continuous presence in the inland waters for twenty-eight straight days, a remarkable run in this age of depleted salmon stocks.

Naturally, I wanted to enjoy these spectacular animals by kayak. I also wanted to photograph them if I could. The trouble was finding them. For a month, the whales had been moving up and down Puget Sound, but their most favored area seemed to be a triangle in north Puget Sound between Edmonds, Eglon, and Possession Point. I made an attempt out of Eglon on November 11. I did meet half a dozen whales, but twenty-five-knot winds and two- to three-foot chop made photography impossible. I could only observe their spouting and breaching from a distance while I struggled to control my kayak in the lumpy conditions.

The next calm morning was November 15. Shortly after dawn, whales were reported north of Point No Point, moving northward into Admiralty Inlet. Admiralty Inlet was farther north than the whales had been all month, an indication they might be preparing to exit Puget Sound to head for the open ocean. Taking a gamble that exit was, indeed, their plan, I positioned myself to intercept. I launched from Point Wilson at the north end of Admiralty Inlet and paddled into the middle of the channel to see if any whales would pass my way.

It was the day before the full-moon spring tide, so currents in Admiralty Inlet were a handful. It was shortly after slack current when I launched, so at first it was no trouble to position myself in the middle of the channel. Then the flood current hit in earnest and began trying to push me south.

A southward push would have carried me closer to the orcas, who were advancing northward up Admiralty Inlet, but it also would have made it difficult to get back to my car. From Point Wilson to Marrowstone Point, for example, is only four miles (6.5 km) as the current pushes the kayak, but it’s a twenty-mile (32 km) hike to retrace on foot!

I pointed my nose into the current and began paddling upstream to maintain my position against the rising current. Soon the current was running nearly three knots, and I could scarcely take a break from paddling to look over my shoulder for whales. Each time I stopped to scan for whale spouts, the current would whisk me southward into the Coupeville ferry lane, where I became a one-man obstruction to maritime traffic until I could fight my way back north again.

My lonely struggle against the current went on for three hours, all while the whales, who had seemed so eager earlier in the day to swim north, dawdled around Lagoon Point some seven miles (11 km) south of me. I worried I had misjudged their intentions and they might return to Puget Sound, leaving me to slog my way back to shore in defeat.

Even after three hours’ waiting, the whales still managed to catch me by surprise. I heard a deep breath to my right, louder than any of the porpoise breaths I’d been hearing all afternoon. I looked over my shoulder just in time to see a dorsal fin receding beneath the water’s surface half a mile (800 m) away. The whales had arrived!

The group today consisted of members of J-pod and K-pod. From my kayak, I counted at least twenty-five animals, but shore-based watchers counted thirty-nine. The whales passed me in clusters of three to nine animals every few minutes for around twenty minutes.

The first cluster, consisting of just three animals, came no closer to me than half a mile. The next cluster, also of three, followed closely in the wake of the first. I assumed the rest of the whales would also follow these pathfinders, but they did not. A cacophony of breaths exploded on the opposite side of my boat. I whipped around to see a pod of nine killer whales heading straight for me just two hundred feet (60 m) away. Here I had been worrying about drifting into collision with the ferry when I should have been worried about collision with the whales.

I banged my paddle against the kayak’s rubber hatch, beating it like drum so the reverberations would alert the whales to my presence. Whether my efforts had any effect I cannot say, but at least the whales did not ram me. They surfaced again just thirty feet (9 m) from my boat and rushed past me beneath a fountain of spray from their breaths.

The whales with the smallest fins huddled in the middle of the pod, so tightly they must almost have been touching one another. Around the perimeter but still within a few meters’ distance swam large, adult males with towering dorsal fins. I had a distinct impression of parents herding children across a busy street.

Each time I thought the show was over, a fresh cluster of orcas would appear to one side of the boat or the other. The final cluster of three circled back and spent about five minutes foraging a few hundred yards up the channel from me.

These more distant whales did not set my heart to pounding the way the large group had at thirty feet, but they were still magnificent. One individual was spy-hopping, sticking its head out of the water to survey its surroundings. Several leaped bodily out of the water and fell back with a crash amid tremendous spray.

The last orca in the pod, an adult male, had a final surprise in store for me. He circled back around south, then made a beeline for me on the surface. He dived just fifty feet (15 m) away, swam under my kayak, and popped up fifty away on the other side. Then he vanished, leaving my heart hammering once again at such a close encounter.

Just twenty minutes after the first whales had overtaken me, the last whales disappeared north toward Point Partridge. After twenty-eight days of continuous foraging in the inland waters, the southern resident killer whales had decided to leave. Social media the next morning was full of forlorn whale-watchers wondering where they’d gone and when they would return.

By the time the last of the whales had passed, the flood current had begun to abate. With effort, I was able to fight my way in the direction of Point Wilson, although I had to maintain an offset of some thirty degrees to avoid being carried away by what was left of the flood. I pulled into the shelter of the marine science center just as the sun was sinking behind the trees on the ridgeline.

No other activity more thoroughly justifies a sea kayak than whale-watching. Only a kayak is so non-threatening to whales that they will approach closely enough to mist the kayaker with spray. Only a kayak is so silent and so solitary that the only noise other than whale spouts is the noise of the kayaker’s own thoughts. Only a kayak places the kayaker so abjectly at the mercy of the currents and the wildlife that Mother Nature alone decides what quality of experience the kayaker will enjoy. This time, she smiled upon my efforts in the middle of Admiralty Inlet and sent me a farewell parade of killer whales.

—Alex Sidles