Patte Schanholtzer watched in dismay as two men in an outboard-powered boat seemed to be harassing a gray whale dining on sand shrimp outside her front window that overlooks Saratoga Passage.

Schanholtzer was disturbed by the Friday afternoon incident. “A couple of guys in a boat were right on top of it,” she said of the whale, which came close to shore to dig up the sand shrimp with its body.

As she saw it, the boat was between the big gray whale and open water and kept closing in on the creature.

“It looked like they were forcing it close to shore,” she said. “It wasn’t feeding, it was trying to flee.”

Several gray whales have been spotted in Puget Sound already this spring. A few leave the great annual migration of whales from California to Alaska and detour into the Sound for the sand shrimp. They usually leave by early June.

The incident reported by Schanholtzer occurred in the area between Harrington Lagoon and Race Lagoon where she has lived for 10 years. She looks forward to the springtime return of the gray whales and doesn’t want to see them harassed. “I realize that if you change the whale’s pattern it could potentially harm them,” she said.

Brian Gorman, public affairs officer for the National Marine Fisheries Service, said Tuesday that there’s a civil penalty of up to $10,000 for harassing a marine mammal, as dictated by the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972.

Gorman said the incident described by Schanholtzer may have constituted whale harassment, but he couldn’t say for sure. Sometimes licensed whale researchers are permitted to study the whales up close, but he said he could find no information on such researchers in Penn Cove on Monday.

The protection act is admittedly “very ambiguous,” Gorman said, and is based on the principle that people can’t take action that would make whales “deviate from their paths.” It’s a hard law to enforce, but agents have taken action in the past. Gorman remembers one incident a few years ago when a float plane pilot was cited for harassment.

“It’s very difficult to prove so we tend to rely on education,” Gorman said. Boaters are urged to not come within 100 yards of a whale, which is the distance commercial whale watching boats in the San Juan Islands respect when taking customers out to watch killer whales.

“You’re pretty safe if you stay 100 yards away,” Gordon advised boaters.

Anyone who spots a gray whale or wants more information can call Orca Network in Greenbank at 866-ORCANET or visit www.orcanetwork.org.