This AM we had a fabulous trip! We left the jetties with amazing visibility miles out onto the horizon, calm seas, and a nice salty ocean breeze. We started out to the west and ran into a few large feeding groups of long-beaked common dolphins, totaling about 450 all together! The first group was a bachelor pod, with their boys only club cruising right along the dropoff. As we headed up north towards La Jolla Canyon, our last two groups were super fun, showing us lots of great surface active behavior as they escorted us further out to sea. We also found a fun little pod of 20 offshore bottlenose! They slowly milled about the boat, swimming on their sides so they could get better looks at us. We eventually began making our trek back towards Mission Bay, but actually caught up with a minke whale! Captain Michael did a fantastic job getting us good looks before we had to jet back home.
We will update you soon about what we’re seeing on our afternoon and sunset trips! Every day out here on the water is a gift, and we can’t wait to share what the ocean has to offer with you.
Naturalist,
Olivia 🙂
What the FLUKE? Seriously, it’s JULY!!!! Why we saw two gray whales cruising up the coast is BEYOND me, but it happened on our sunset cruise!
We cruised out west and saw an ENORMOUS spout on the horizon, cruised over – thinking it was likely a humpback whale – when we got there – a blue glow appeared under water and we thought – maybe a blue??? Then it surfaced and the distinct head of a gray whale gave us quite the surprise. Usually these whales have made it alll the way up to Alaska by now. Eventually a second smaller spout surfaced next to the larger one. We were all aghast. We managed to locate dolphins after that as well, a solid pod of feeding long beaks! The surfed in the wake and played exuberantly near our vessel. Our waters have been FULL of dolphins in huge numbers, we saw nearly 600 of them on our afternoon trip.
Naturalist, Alison
