OUR FAVORITE BLUE GIANTS HAVE RETURNED!
It has been 12 days since we last saw a blue whale but it seems that they may be looping back around for one more stop by San Diego before they move on to krillier pastures. The weather conditions today were unbeatable! Warm weather, blue skies and clear ocean water! The visibility was incredible so we could see life from miles away through our binoculars. Our first trip of the day had two spunky pods of dolphins, a solid mix of short beaks and long beaks. The shorties were found way off the coast in over 2000 feet of water, the long beaked in closer to shore in about 70 ft of water. Both pods were full of little babies wiggling as fast as they could to keep up with the rest of the pod. On our afternoon trip, we were tipped off by our friends @ Gone Whale Watching – so we knew where we needed to go to find the blue whale! We ran straight out of the jetties to the south knowing we needed to make haste if we wanted to find our favorite giants in time. Luckily, we found a whale much closer than we were expecting to so we had about 45 mins so sit and hang out with this blue whale. This whale had a 5 min surface interval so, we got TONS of good looks before heading back to land. A bonus pod of dolphins appeared just before we re-entered the jetties! It’s GORGEOUS out there today!
We had an amazing Sunset Whale Watch! We caught up with not one Blue whale but SIX of them! We left the jetties super anxious and hopeful that we could catch up with the Blue whale sighted on afternoon trip. We cruised out beyond the drop-off and were excited to see an acrobatic pod of ~100 Short-beaked Common dolphin! They were leaping, breaching, porpoising, tail-slapping all around us! We got amazing looks at them as they zoomed to the north. Captain John spotted some bigger splashes to the west. They were Offshore bottlenose dolphin that disappeared by the time we caught up to their zone. Then all of a sudden a massive coloumnar spout on the horizon! We screamed with excitement! Then another spout appeared, then another and another! We counted SIX Blue whales! The sunset glow paired with tall spouts was pure magic! We were lucky enough to see the a couple of the whales lift their flukes! We waved goodbye to our new whale friends and spotted the Offshore Bottlenose dolphins! We watched them porpoise in the sunset!
We hope these whales stick around so you all get a chance to run out here and see them before they disappear for the year!
Naturalists,
Alison & Vanessa
