On the morning of April 1, 2026, a photographer named Hongming Zhing stood on the north-side dive access at Three Tree Point and photographed an orca rising straight up out of the water, eye above the surface, looking back at him. It was not a resident. It was not even a known animal. The three whales in that group were a trio of unknown orcas, and about 99.5% of orcas that show up here are familiar ones with already designated IDs and names, but not these three until their first visit in March, and they are now designated T419, T420, and T421. They carried bite marks from cookie-cutter sharks, parasitic small sharks whose scars indicate the whales traveled either into low-latitude waters or far offshore, and had been seen once before in Anchorage, Alaska.

If you have lived on the Point for more than a season, you already know orcas pass by. The point of this post is not that they do. The point is that the pattern of who is passing by has quietly changed, the reporting network around it has quietly matured, and a resident who understands both can turn what feels like a lucky sighting into something closer to a standing appointment.

What is actually in the water this year

The bigger picture matters here, because it explains why the shore in front of your house is busier than it used to be. A dataset spanning nearly half a century shows that endangered Southern Resident killer whales are spending less time in inland waters, while their larger cousins, Bigg's killer whales, are increasingly present in Puget Sound; NOAA listed Southern Residents as endangered in 2005 after a rapid population decline in the late 1990s, and just 74 remain, split into three pods, J, K, and L. University of Washington researchers modeled migratory trends from The Whale Museum's Sightings Archive between 1978 and 2022 and found that K and L pods are visiting Puget Sound less often, while the J pod remains well represented.

Translated to the shoreline off SW 170th: the salmon-eating residents you may remember watching in the 1990s are less reliable, and the mammal-eating transients (Bigg's) that will happily hunt a harbor seal within sight of your kitchen window are more so. The West Seattle Blog's whale reporting through community scientist Kersti Muul has documented transients moving through the Fauntleroy ferry lanes, off south Blake Island, and around West Point on a nearly weekly cadence this spring and summer. Three Tree Point sits directly in that corridor.

The three doors to the beach

Burien identifies three street-end public access points along the Point's shoreline, and each behaves differently for shore-based watching:

• SW 170th Street. This is the address the Whale Trail publishes as the official Three Tree Point site. The Whale Trail lists it as public beach access at the end of SW 170th in Burien, popular with divers and a great place to watch for orcas, with limited parking and no facilities. It is also the exact spot where the T419s were photographed spyhopping. If you have out-of-town guests and one hour, this is the door.
• SW 163rd Street. The north-facing option. Useful when a Muul report says a group is coming south from Blake Island or Alki, because you will pick them up earliest here.
• SW 172nd Street. South-facing. Better when animals are moving north from Point Robinson on Maury Island toward Elliott Bay, which is a common Bigg's routing.

The Point has 2.5 miles of waterfront, and the practical effect of three access points spread across it is that residents can triangulate: north, mid, south. Boaters see one animal. Someone standing on the correct street-end sees the direction of travel.

Who to follow before you pick up the binoculars

This is the part that separates people who catch whales from people who hear about them the next day.

The unglamorous answer is Facebook and a few purpose-built sites. The Orca Behavior Institute collaborates with numerous groups and individuals to help confirm, ID, document, and track killer whale sightings throughout the Salish Sea, with primary partners including Orca Network, the Pacific Whale Watch Association, the PWWA App, and regional community sightings networks on social media, and this type of tracking is only possible due to the contributions of hundreds of community scientists. Orca Network's recent-sightings feed is the fastest public source; entries are timestamped to the minute and geotagged.

Read a real entry from May 2026 and you can see how a Point resident would use it. Someone posted an unidentified baleen whale sighting at roughly 47.467, -122.390, which the report itself notes is 1.5 nautical miles north of Three Tree Point. That is roughly nine minutes of paddling, or the time it takes to walk from a Shorewood-adjacent living room down to SW 163rd with a coat on.

For the west-facing view of what is inbound from the north, the West Seattle Blog's whales archive is the closest thing to a real-time ticker. Reports read like flight tracking: northbound off south Blake Island, southbound approaching Fauntleroy, surface-active south of West Point. A southbound group off Blake Island is roughly 40 minutes from crossing the sightline off the Point's north beach.

The T419 story, and why it is worth understanding

It is tempting to file the April 1 spyhop as a novelty. It is more useful to file it as evidence.

The three animals showed up in Vancouver in March 2026 and confused everyone because they were not recognized as any of the known orcas in the Salish Sea; Emma Luck recognized the trio as a group that had been spotted in Anchorage, Alaska almost exactly one year prior, and given the sparse sightings over the years and the mysterious cookie-cutter shark scars they were donning, most assumed they would make their way out of the Salish Sea quickly, but they were spotted in Seattle a week later and hung out in Puget Sound for most of March and April, mingling with many of the known West Coast Transient pods.

The takeaway is not that a rare animal showed up once. It is that the water in front of the Point is now producing genuinely new identifications, animals that have never been catalogued in the Salish Sea before this year. The shore-based whale-watching value of your address is going up, not down.

Rules of the road, even from shore

The Highline Journal's April coverage of the T419 sighting included the standard boat-based etiquette that Point residents with kayaks and paddleboards should have committed to memory before Labor Day weekend:

If you go out on a boat to observe them, please stay at least 200 yards away. Be parallel to the direction the whales are moving, and do not park in their path unless you are at least 400 yards away. Also, reduce speed to 7 knots or less at the first sign of any whale.

For divers, and Three Tree Point is one of central Puget Sound's better-known dive sites, the practical rule is simpler: if you are in the water when a Bigg's group comes through, you are inside their hunting grid. Get out.

The July and August rhythm

Something quiet happens on the Point in mid-summer that is worth naming. The Three Tree Point Yacht Club hosts monthly dinners from January through June, pauses scheduled social events in July and August during cruising season, and returns with an annual picnic and club meeting in September. The organized social calendar dims exactly when the water is warmest and the shoreline is most walkable. That is when the informal calendar takes over: the neighbor with the good binoculars on the seawall, the group text that lights up when someone spots a blow off Vashon, the folding chair someone left on the beach at SW 172nd.

Late summer is also historically strong for Bigg's activity in central Puget Sound. The June 25, 2025 sighting record on Orca Network tracked a group moving north along the Vashon shore past Point Robinson toward Three Tree Point over the course of a single afternoon, with reports coming in from Redondo pier, Gold Beach, and finally the north-side beaches. If a similar chain of reports posts this August, you will have somewhere between 45 and 90 minutes of notice.

What all of this actually adds up to

Living on Three Tree Point has always come with a marine soundtrack: the ferry horns, the seaplanes, the occasional harbor seal barking at 3 a.m. The whales were part of that soundtrack but felt like weather, something that happened to you rather than something you scheduled.

The combination of a shifting population mix, a maturing citizen-science network, and three well-placed public access points changes that math. A resident who bookmarks two sites, follows one Facebook group, and knows which street-end faces which direction can convert what used to be lucky glimpses into a repeatable summer routine. That is the quiet upgrade this stretch of shoreline received in 2026, and it is one of the more genuinely local reasons the address holds its value the way it does.

If you are thinking about the long-term case for a home on the Point, or preparing to list one and wondering how to translate this kind of shoreline texture into a marketing story a buyer actually feels, Michelle Codd Homes works with owners on exactly that translation. Reach out for a conversation about your home's value and how the Point's outdoor rhythm shapes it.