Whale sight seeing excursion in Va Beach

[rsvman]

On a deep sea fishing trip in 2016 out of Morehead City, we saw a pod of minke whales a couple hundred yards from the boat. Later, another captain said his charter saw ten orcas about two miles offshore. Orcas sometimes come close to the NC coast. AKA as "killer whales", orcas are actually dolphins..

And dolphins, technically, are whales.

[sagegrouse]

Big, air-breathing marine critters (a) with teeth include some whales and all dolphins and porpoises, with orcas listed as dolphins; and (b) without teeth include a bunch of filter-feeding whales.

More than you want to know about whales, dolphins, and porpoises (Wikipedia):

Cetaceans are aquatic mammals constituting the infraorder Cetacea. There are around 89 living species, which are divided into two parvorders.

The first is the Odontoceti, the toothed whales, which consist of around 70 species, including the dolphin (which includes killer whales), porpoise, beluga whale, narwhal, sperm whale, and beaked whale.

The second is the Mysticeti, the baleen whales, which have a filter-feeder system, and consist of fifteen species divided into three families, and include the blue whale, right whale, bowhead whale, rorqual, and gray whale.