We had a Whaley great day!! We caught up with Gray whales, Fin whales, and both Short-beaked and Long-beaked Common dolphins! We started our morning off with sighting some scattered Long-beaked Common dolphins feeding under diving birds. Out to the west we spotted a spout that belonged to a pair of Gray whales! We there was only one when both surfaced at the same time! We enjoyed great looks at the pair before leaving to deeper water! We passed the drop-off and spotted tall, columnar spouts! We found the same cow/calf pair we sighted yesterday! They were playing follow the leader! Mom would surface then the calf would pop up behind it! We noticed a big pod of ~200 Short-beaked Common dolphins racing toward us and then turned SW. We waved goodbye to our new Fin Friends and caught up with the active pod of Commons! There were tiny little football sized newborn calves observed in the mix! On our way home, we hung out with a fast moving pod of ~100 Long-beaked Common dolphins racing to the north.
On our afternoon trip, we pushed out quickly to the west. We passed a huge raft of ~20 California sea lions that porpoised beside the boat! After passing the drop-off, we caught up with the cow/calf pair of Fin whales again! One of our first sightings was one of the whales excreting a bright reddish brown stream of whale poo!! Due to the color we know they are feeding on KRILL! We got super lucky and observed this amazing pair traveling north. They would pop up behind us and they followed us closely by our starboard side! They turned toward us and went for a dive! We had an amazing time!
Our sunset trip was a beautiful one, we were hopeful to head out west and find the fin whales that our previous trip had hung out with. We were very lucky to find them again! Initially, we found them both swimming together, seemingly going in circles and diving intermittently to feast on the krill down below. Good morning. The smaller of the two whales took off in another direction, but the larger fin whale stayed traveling next to us for quite some time after about 45 minutes. We decided to take off and search for some other wildlife. We headed north open the La Jolla Canyon and the east to get a little bit closer to shore, after a good amount of searching, we spotted some birds flying around in the sky and down beneath them, there was a pod of long beak, common dolphins, feeding on small schooling bait fish.
We have one more trip to go!
Naturalist, Vanessa & Alison
