We had an ACTION PACKED afternoon trip aboard the Privateer! We spotted ~15 Inshore bottlenose dolphins at the mouth of the jetties! They zoomed over to us, including a cow/calf pair! We continued to the SW and caught up with an amazing ALMOST Megapod! There were about 800 Long-beaked Common dolphins slowly cruising to the north along the drop-off! We were completely surrounded and enjoyed amazing surface active behaviors! It seemed like we observed every kind of social behavior, like breaching, porpoising, tail-slapping, chin-slapping and people watching! There were many cow/calf pairs in the mix too! We could even hear them vocalizing! We left them behind in search of more. They went north while we went south. We found a small pod of ~40 short-beaked Common dolphins going down for dives feeding in the water column. We pushed out to the west and had quick looks at a Humpback whale that was closely following the same big pod of Long-beaked Common dolphins we sighted earlier in the trip. While waiting for the whale to surface the Commons took off and stampeded around us! They fanned out into a huge arc generally to the south! It was exhilarating to witness such energy! The Humpback followed them! We noticed a couple dolphins and a sea lion accompanying the Humpback. It swished its tail at the surface likely in response to the energetic movements from the sea lion and dolphins! We spotted a spout from a single NB Gray whale on our way in! And our grande finale was a nice greeting from a small pod of Inshore bottlenose dolphins at the Mission bay jetties!
Right off the bat we had feeding bottlenose at the mouth of the jetties! The channel isn’t a great place for stopping so, we set out the west to try and catch up with the dame wildlife we had spotted earlier – we found an ENORMOUS feeding frenzie that was spread out over a few square miles – initially – it looked like a cloud of gnats o the horizon through the binoculars. As we got closer to the biomass – we could see that there were birds and dolphins EVERYWHERE! We were in 1, 700 feet of water out past the drop off about 10 miles from shore. We spent so much time cruising along with all the wildlife, the dolphins playing in our wake, birds diving all around us. We even had a small warbler hitch hike its way back to land with us!
Naturalist,
Vanessa & Alison
