Peter Horsman was idling in his boat at the Ballard Locks on the evening of August 10, waiting his turn through the chamber with his daughter, when the water beside them broke open. Three young orcas surfaced close enough to touch the hull.
"Wait, that can't be!" he remembers thinking.
Within minutes, phones were out across Salmon Bay. By the next morning, the videos were everywhere: dorsal fins slicing past a spot where the biggest spectacle most days is a fishing trawler dropping 26 feet in a concrete chamber. If you've spent any time around the Locks, you already know they don't usually do orcas. Seals, yes. Salmon, in season. Kayakers threading past sailboats on a Saturday. A pod of transient killer whales working the water column right off the visitor center was something even longtime regulars said they'd never seen.
Here's the part that didn't make most of the headlines: the orcas weren't a fluke. They were the predictable end result of an engineering decision made in 1917, and Seattle spent three decades trying to fake exactly what happened for real on August 10.
The Chokepoint Nobody Designed
The Hiram M. Chittenden Locks, which everyone just calls the Ballard Locks, exist to solve one problem. The Army Corps of Engineers needed a way to keep Lake Washington and Lake Union sitting at a controlled level, roughly 20 to 22 feet above the salt water on the other side, while still letting boats cross between the two. That's the whole job. Nobody on the original design team was thinking about seals, salmon runs, or apex predators.
But the locks also created something the Corps never set out to build: a bottleneck. Every salmon coming back from the Pacific has to funnel through one narrow fish ladder, a run of 21 stepped weirs, to reach the spawning grounds upstream. That means every predator that eats salmon, or eats the things that eat salmon, has learned exactly where to wait. Seals and sea lions have staked out that chokepoint for decades, because a narrow lane of concentrated fish is easier hunting than the open Sound.
This August, something bigger noticed the same thing. Deborah Giles, a scientist with the SeaDoc Society, told reporters the transient orcas involved, also known as Bigg's killer whales, were almost certainly hunting the seals and sea lions clustered at the spillway rather than the salmon themselves. Unlike the fish-eating southern resident orcas most people picture when they think "Puget Sound orca," Bigg's killer whales specialize in marine mammals. For salmon trying to survive the gauntlet below the locks, Giles called the sighting a "best-case scenario for salmon recovery."
That's the mechanism. The 1917 engineering built a chokepoint. The chokepoint built a decades-long seal buffet. The seal buffet, once it got big enough, eventually pulled in something that eats seals.
The Decoy That Never Worked
There's a small fiberglass orca sitting near the visitor center today, and its backstory is the closest thing this neighborhood has to a punchline about trying to out-engineer nature.
Back in 1996, the city lowered a 16-foot fiberglass orca, nicknamed Fake Willy, into the water near the locks, betting that the mere sight of a predator shape would spook the seals and sea lions away from the fish ladder. A local radio host even recorded a novelty song to go with the stunt. The seals ignored it completely. The city eventually gave up on the idea, and years later Fake Willy resurfaced at the locks again, this time simply parked near the visitor center as a piece of local trivia rather than a working deterrent.
Thirty years after that failed experiment, real orcas did in a single evening what a fiberglass one couldn't manage in years of trying. Nobody had to explain to them where the food was.
This Wasn't a One-Time Thing
If the story ended on August 10, it would just be a good anecdote. It doesn't end there.
A research team including Zoe Rand, Laura Koehn, Alexis Morrigan, and M. Bradley Hanson published a study in June analyzing killer whale detections in Washington waters from 1978 through 2022. The probability of Bigg's killer whales showing up in these inland waters climbed from 4 percent to 66 percent over that span. Morrigan, a researcher with The Whale Museum, was also the one who confirmed the identity of one of the whales at the locks: "We can confirm that these are Bigg's killer whales, including T137A 'Jack.'"
The pattern kept going through the rest of August. Less than a week after the locks sighting, a separate group of seven Bigg's whales, mostly from the T36 pod, breached off Gig Harbor. A few days after that, Bigg's killer whales turned up again near Shilshole Bay, close enough to the spillway dam that officials said it was the first time in recent memory they'd come that close.
Deborah Giles, describing the broader shift to public radio, said the southern resident orcas that used to show up in these inland waters almost daily, especially in July, simply didn't appear at all in July of this year. Bigg's killer whales, meanwhile, have been spotted somewhere in the region every day so far in 2026. Her explanation for why one type of orca is thriving here while the other has gone quiet came down to food supply: "It comes through in bursts, depending on where the salmon is heading."
Southern residents depend on salmon runs that move around unpredictably. Bigg's whales depend on seals and sea lions that have permanently parked themselves at a handful of predictable chokepoints, and the Ballard Locks are one of the best ones in the state.
What's Actually Still Running
The orcas themselves have moved on. They're transients by nature and by name. But the salmon run that drew the seals that drew the orcas is still very much in progress, and knowing where you are in that calendar changes what's worth a trip out to the locks right now.
| Species | Typical Peak Window | Typical Run Size | Status as of late August |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sockeye | July | Smaller and more variable in recent years | Already passed |
| Chinook | Mid to late August | About 15,000 fish in a typical year | In its final stretch |
| Coho | September | About 25,000 fish in a typical year | Just getting underway |
That last column matters. If you've been meaning to go see the Chinook run, this is close to the last week to catch it before it tapers off. If you miss it, the coho run that follows is actually the bigger of the two, both in fish count and in the length of time it stays active into fall.
How to See What's Left
The fish ladder viewing room is open daily from 7 a.m. to 8:45 p.m., year-round, and admission is free. During summer months, rangers lead free tours at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., which is the easiest way to get a straight answer on what's actually passing through that day rather than guessing based on a seasonal average. Seals are still very likely to be visible even without an orca in sight. That's the whole point of the chokepoint. It works on ordinary days too.
North of the locks, the Carl S. English Jr. Botanical Garden is worth the walk on its own, with more than 500 species of trees and plants spread across manicured lawns that double as one of the better spots in the neighborhood to watch boat masts glide through the chambers while you wait for the next fish to show up in the window.
Worth an Afternoon
If you're making a day of it, the locks sit within easy reach of a few spots worth folding into the trip. The National Nordic Museum and the Ballard Farmers Market are both close by if you're timing a weekend visit. The Walrus and the Carpenter, the neighborhood's well-known oyster bar, recently reopened after reaching a labor agreement with its staff. Tractor Tavern is a short walk away if you want live music to close out the evening.
None of this required a single design decision about seals or orcas. The locks were built to move boats and hold water levels steady. Everything else, the seals, the salmon math, the once-in-a-generation orca appearance, is just what happens when a piece of infrastructure quietly becomes the best hunting ground in Puget Sound.
If you're spending an afternoon at the locks and find yourself wondering what it would actually take to live within walking distance of Salmon Bay, Anthony Prado and the team at AMP Properties Group NW track the Seattle market every day, not just when the orcas show up. Get an instant home valuation or reach out anytime you're ready to talk through what's actually for sale near the neighborhoods you already know.
