SEATTLE _ He saw the orca looming, so close, in the sea pen hastily welded together for the more-than 400-mile tow to Seattle.
"I dive down and oh God, there is this shadow four feet away, looking at me," said Ted Griffin, remembering his first moments with Namu, soon to become the world's first performing captive killer whale.
Then he heard it: A loud SQUEAK.
"I think it is the whale, so I go 'EEEE' and within half a second, the whale squeaks," Griffin said, eyes still wide with the memory. "My God, I am crying, I can barely keep my mask on. It is indescribable. What has happened is that all those years I am wanting an animal to say hello, and one has. I am thunderstruck."
Word of Namu _ named for the remote B.C. village where he was accidentally caught in a fishermen's net _ quickly spread. Thousands of onlookers backed up for miles on and near Deception Pass Bridge hoping to catch a glimpse when Namu's Navy, as the orca's entourage of onlookers, press and promoters was called, passed beneath.
Arriving in Seattle on July 28, 1965, Griffin was given a hero's welcome and a key to the city.
In the weeks to come, thousands flocked and paid to see the whale at Griffin's Seattle Marine Aquarium at Pier 56. Namu fever stoked an international craze for killer whales to put on exhibit all over the nation and the world. Captors particularly targeted the young, the cheapest to ship.
For more than a decade, Puget Sound was the primary source of supply.
By 1976 some 270 orcas were captured _ many multiple times _ in the Salish Sea, the transboundary waters between the U.S. and Canada, according to historian Jason Colby at the University of Victoria. At least 12 of those orcas died during capture, and more than 50, mostly Puget Sound's critically endangered southern residents, were kept for captive display. All are dead by now but one.
Despite it all, the southern residents battled their way back to a population of 98 by 2005, only to be hammered once again by an assault of overfishing, development, pollution, habitat degradation and now climate change that threatens us all.
Mark Overland, of Gig Harbor, remembers well watching the orca captures that unfolded before his eyes, and going to court to stop them. Now the region's burgeoning growth and development ever since threaten the orcas in ways just as real as a harpoon.
"We saved them, but for what?" Overland said.
It was actually the capture era that for the first time enabled humans to understand the complex intelligence of an animal that went in a generation from reviled to revered, and finally, protected. A look back at that period is a reminder of how the region's special relationship with the orca evolved.
Namu and Griffin started it all: the orca and orca catcher who would change the world.
