Orcas Island Quake Hit Directly Under Sportsman’s Boat Buoy

Gary Lundquist can say something about the buoy he moors his fishing and crabbing boat to that no other Northwest sportsman can.

It marked the epicenter of Monday morning’s 4.5-magnitude Orcas Island earthquake.

“That red dot is my mooring buoy,” he texted me yesterday about where the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network had pinpointed the 5:02 a.m. quake.

“Hopefully it didn’t get shaken loose,” I joked.

I’ve known Gary for, well, a long time now – his daughter Chelan was on the cover of our very first issue back in October 2008 and his son Wyatt was on the front page of the January issue – and this latest event adds to a long list of peculiarities their clan has been witness to on and around the beautiful North Sound island.

Not long after Monday’s quake, I’d jokingly asked him whether they’d been setting off fireworks at their homestead and farm near Olga early that morning.

Gary, who lives in Eatonville when he’s not haying, fishing, crabbing or hunting on the island, initially joshed about certain Swedish fishing tactics that may or may not involve dynamite – “BOOM!!!” – but as he zoomed in on the epicenter, he quickly realized the quake had actually hit right on the shores of the family property.

“No damage at our place, but Aunt Betty was up and felt it pretty good. Her house is right there 150 feet away,” Gary reported this morning.

Per PNSN, the quake struck about 10 miles deep and was also felt from Victoria and Vancouver, BC, to Port Angeles and Parkland, Washington. Dozens of small rumblings have also been recorded nearby in recent days and weeks.

Earthquakes, of course, are a natural feature of our tectonically active region, but this latest one only grows Lundquist family lore and the power of this place.

“Bluefin, tanner crab, black bears and elk? Now this!!” Gary emailed.

He and his other son JD were among the first people to spot the bluefin tuna that died at the head of Orcas Island’s East Sound back in July 2023. They’d been driving to the ferry dock that morning after cutting hay the day before when they spotted the fish’s carcass laying high and dry on the beach.

Bluefin numbers have increased in recent years, likely due to federal fishery restrictions on their harvest that has effectively rebuilt the eastern Pacific stock, but while coastal native oral histories mention trapping the fish in dead-end bays, until this one showed up there was zero record of the species ever occurring in the inside waters of the Salish Sea.

In 2014, Gary and Wyatt caught a tanner, or bairdi, crab in the San Juans, the first he’d ever pulled up in 50-plus years of crabbing the islands.

In 2017, a black bear that swam over to Orcas Island from … somewhere turned up on the road to the homestead.

Hot on the trail of the bruin the following year came a pair of bull elk that gave Gary’s uncle John Willis quite a start.

“Well, this morning I planned on going to town, but chose not to do that,” Willis told me. “I looked out my window at my (sister Betty’s) house and here are two bull elk eating leaves off of a filbert tree in front of her house. I was not quite ready to see two elk this morning.”

Willis, who passed away in 2019, was as avid about salmon fishing as he was about keeping detailed weather logs, which the extended family has been recording since 1889 and “which makes them the only family in the United States that has a continuous, unbroken record of weather from the exact same spot for more than a century,” according to his obituary in a local newspaper.

Before the family homesteaded what’s also known as Deer Beach, the Lummis used it, and they still do to launch on the homeward stretch of their canoe journeys, Gary said.

Of course, on the geologic time scale, there have probably been many earthquakes under where Gary’s buoy is now moored.

“The type of earthquake that happened on Monday is not unexpected, but its faulting direction was a bit different than what we usually see,” said Dr. Renate Hartog, manager of the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network at the University of Washington.

In the grand scheme, three massive plates – Juan de Fuca, Pacific and North American – are interacting to deform Western Washington, she said, and that causes earthquakes from time to time as all the rocks get realigned.

“Now what has that to do with what happens in the San Juans, you ask? It turns out that the Oregon is being rotated as an almost solid block, and it is pushing Washington into British Columbia. This causes north-south compression of the North American crust in Western and Central Washington,” Hartog said.

She said that the seismic network will soon be publishing a blog to explain the Olga quake in more depth.

Meanwhile, Gary said the San Juan County tax assessor swung by on Tuesday to ask if anything had changed with the homestead over the past year. He said he’d told the assessor that the “mountain” there was a now little taller in the wake of the quake.

He admitted he was pulling my leg about the mountain part.

But I wouldn’t doubt it either.