Kinny Corthell, owner of Eastport Charter, had a regular whale watch planned for Friday but went out further than usual in hopes of catching a glimpse of a killer whale nicknamed “Old Thom.”
“I got word he was out off Grand Manan and conditions were perfect today, so I decided the opportunity was too good to pass up as it’s not often he is that close to us,” Corthell said.
Old Thom is a solitary orca in a part of the world that has few of them. By most accounts, the bull with a telltale notch in his dorsal fin is the only orca that regularly comes to the Gulf of Maine.
He has been spotted in whale-watching territory from Nova Scotia to Massachusetts, and has occasionally been seen keeping company with dolphins, a family to which orcas belong as the largest members. Among whale enthusiasts, a sighting of Old Thom is often described as a bucket list item.
That was true for Corthell and also Chris Bartlett, senior extension program manager at the University of Maine who was on Friday’s whale watching trip. Bartlett had seen orcas in the wild when he lived in southeast Alaska, but he’d never seen one — the one — in the Gulf of Maine. The last time Old Thom was sighted near Eastport was four years ago, he said.
“When I saw the dorsal break the surface, I knew exactly what it was at a distance,” Bartlett said.
Corthell captured videos of Old Thom surfacing a number of times not far from the whale watching boat, the tall dorsal fin making wide arcs above the calm surface of the ocean.
“I decided to go for it, and it was all worth it, he said.
