Orca spotted off Cape Cod

CHATHAM — Charter boat captain Bruce Peters was trolling for tuna about 11 miles out of Chatham Monday morning when he saw something he’d only seen one other time in a lifetime of fishing.

About 75 yards away a fin surfaced. Not the fin of a great white shark, which has become a somewhat familiar sight, but the tall slim triangular dorsal fin of a killer whale. Peters, who owns Capeshores Charters, rushed to grab his $80 point-and-shoot camera and his clients onboard the Marilyn S. reached for their cellphones and they all started shooting.

“There were a whole bunch of humpys and minkes to the east, but this one was solitary,” Peters said about the whale. “Didn’t think it was an orca at first and then I saw its flukes and said ‘That’s a killer whale.’”

Peters had seen killer whales before, but on the West Coast when he was working as a fisherman out of San Francisco and fishing near the Farallon Islands.

Whale researchers are nearly certain the whale seen by Peters is a male, named Old Thom, that has been seen repeatedly in the Bay of Fundy since 2010.

“He followed the boat for a while and gave us the fin show a bunch of times,” Peters said.