A whale-y eventful day so far!! We started the day headed west and ran into a pod of about 700 long-beaked common dolphins. They were a super spunky group, breaching and riding our bow. Then we spotted a tiny blow a few hundred feet away, and found a minke whale!! This youngin swam underneath our boat, popping up right at our bow and giving our passengers some beautiful looks. The water visibility was so amazing, we could see the whale swimming right up to us! We bid the minke farewell and continued on our oceanic adventure to see what other wildlife we could find. As we scanned the horizon, we caught the unmistakable blow of a blue whale! This individual came up for a few surfacings, hopefully having a fin-tastic time feeding on some krill. We began to get our last looks and start our journey back home- but stumbled upon TWO MORE blue whales! Not just any blue whales… a COW-CALF PAIR!!! The whole boat squealed with excitement as we watched the calf surface alongside its mother. With the excellent water conditions and visibility, we could very clearly see that notorious blue glow of the whales underwater (which is how they get their name)!
We truly couldn’t have asked for better way to end our AM trip. It’s been a wonderful day so far, and we will update you this evening about our sunset trip!
Our afternoon trip had to be cancelled due to the rare event of a lightning storm at the start of the trip. We did, however, have a sunset trip and had the opportunity to witness two pods of very active Offshore Bottlenose Dolphins. We had amazing looks at a nursery pod with tiny babies just a few days old popping up and porpoising next to their mothers. Many were seen off of our bow with a few breaches, high leaps, along with surfing our wake creating rooster tails, as we humans squealed, shouted and encouraged the inquisitive dolphins to stay with us. Despite a thorough search of the horizon for miles over the “9-Mile Bank, we could not find any of the big, baleen whales, but we were happy with our toothed whale dolphin friends, for sure. The sun popped out behind some clouds as we made our way back to Mission Bay and cameras captured the bright, sunny orb as it dipped toward the horizon.
Naturalists, Olivia, Vanessa & Greg
