We are in our Dolphin Days of Summer! The Common dolphins are really showing us their best! On our morning trip, we enjoyed hanging out with multiple pods of Long-beaked Common dolphin! The first pod was moving in from the west and headed straight for our boat! They were in a long line that began to cruise south on the drop-off. We got amazing looks as they surfed beside us! We saw plenty of calves in the pod of ~300. We continued up toward La Jolla and spotted a huge feeding frenzy with terns in a tizzy following the dolphins every move! We could see bait balls of anchovies being devoured! A bachelor pod zoomed over to us and surfed both sides of our boat in our wake. We had glassy water throughout most of the trip making it easy to track the dolphins! They would even turn and take a peek at us! Lots of kelp paddy’s out there with birds lined up! We had a brief sighting of a pelagic ray! Just outside of the jetties, we sighted one last pod of ~50 Long-beaks traveling north. We have 2 more trips on the Inspiration and one more trip on the Privateer! We will update you soon!
On our AM Inspiration trip, we left the jetties and visited with four different feeding frenzies of long-beaked common dolphins! We have been having beautiful conditions today with 250 dolphins sighted alone on our first trip. On our PM trip we had a total of 420 long-beaked common dolphins! We had two really large pods, and we could see tons of elegant terns coming up with anchovies, which is certainly a yummy snack. The dolphins on our second trip were much more spunkier than the last, which lots of surface active behaviors to match.
Naturalists,
Vanessa & Olivia
