After sounding the horn, Captain Michael departed our slip with a bit of boat traffic behind us, but soon we were observing our feathered and flippered friends at the floating bait pier. Herons, egrets, cormorants, pelicans, the ubiquitous gulls and some gregarious, sleeping sea lions were seen. On the mooring ball a game of “king of the Pinnipeds was happening. Once we exited the Mission Bay Channel, we saw the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or NOAA research vessel Bell M. Shimada, commissioned in 2010 and based out of Newport, Oregon. This vessel conducts marine mammal and seabird surveys and does both acoustic and trawl surveys. It uses a multibeam echo sounder (MBES), one of only three systems of its type worldwide. Scientists can detect fish as the ship passes over. Soon after seeing the huge NOAA research vessel, Captain Michael got word from a small boat about a whale heading north along Sunset Cliffs toward Ocean Beach. We found the humpback whale doing tail-throws and breaches. We saw a few spouts, but did not get an identifying photo of the underside of the tail flukes that we like to report to the website happywhale dot com. Happywhale has hundreds of thousands of photos and over 1000 whales identified by the unique tail flukes. We were amazed to come across about 600 Long-beaked common dolphins that seemed to enjoy our boat as they were on time for the “human-watching” tour. They porpoised, turned on their sides to look at us, did a few breaches and surfed our wake and bow. Later, another pod of about 400 porpoising dolphins were 4-5 miles off of Bird Rock (between Pacific Beach and LaJolla), for a grand total of over 1000 dolphins. To top it all off, sunshine greeted us back in Quivira Basin! Join us on a whale watch tour soon.
Have you ever wondered why dolphins like to go up & down when they swim alongside the boat ? – I don’t know why either but they do it on PORPOISE!
Okay, enough with the whale jokes, they are krillin’ me softly! On today’s sunset trip, we searched the ocean for many nautical miles before we FINally encountered some dolphriends! They were hanging out about ~7.5 miles offshore. It was a widespread and scattered pod but there were at least ~200 long-beaked common dolphins in the general area! It was so fun to see them leap around & surf along side the boat. Tomorrow brings more ocean fun, SEA you there!
Naturalists,
Greg & Melissa
