Remembering Lolita- Whidbey Examiner

By Sue Ellen White

 Examiner Staff Writer

“You could hear the whales squealing when they pulled them out,” Stone said. “It drove my cat crazy.”

Working a summer job at the Captain Whidbey Inn, Stone became an intimate witness to an infamous event: the 1970 capture of orca whales in Penn Cove by entrepreneurs engaged in the then-legal business of selling the wild marine mammals to aquariums and theme parks.

Stone transported newspaperman Wally Funk out to the whale hunters’ raft to photograph the capture. His parents owned the inn and the site where the whales were trapped was just a third of a mile away.

“My gut reaction was this was the wrong thing to do,” he said. “I was not alone, but I was not in the majority. These were ‘killer whales.’”

On Aug. 8, 1970, Stone was scheduled to work the evening shift in the restaurant, but was off during the day. He remembers the noise, airplanes and high-speed boats that arrived in the cove, driving about 90 whales before them.

It was a superpod of the combined family groups or pods, named “J,” “K” and “L,” belonging to the Southern Resident orcas whose home range is the Salish Sea. The area encompasses Puget Sound and the Northwest Straits in Northwest Washington and British Columbia’s Gulf Islands and Georgia Strait.

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