“What’s with the cool weather, like air conditioning?” A question from one of our Arizona guests. After May “gray”, we had June gloom, July “no sky” and now we are in Fog-aust with the usual atmospheric marine layer of gray skies. When hot air rises inland of the coast, it creates convection, pulling the warm air far offshore over the cold California current. Cooling air holds less moisture than warm air, and condensation occurs, hence the fog.
We saw a half-dozen species of wading and seabirds and California sea lions basking on the floating bait dock. Brown pelicans, brandt’s cormorants, great egrets, snowy egrets, Western gulls and Heermann’s gulls.
We got out over the 9-Mile BAnk and saw thousands of birds wheeling and diving. A term fisherman use is “baitball” to describe the schooling fish that swim in massive clouds, like an underwater tornado. We saw at least 10 baitballs with hundreds of Long-beaked common dolphins. On our way back, we found a Minke whale and got some good looks.
Holy Dolphins Batman!
There was no shortage of friendly toothed whales on the afternoon trip aboard the privateer today!
Heading to the southwest beyond the drop-off the most enormous brief of pelicans was hanging out about 9 miles from Mission bay, some resting some flying but all were feeding. But they weren’t alone – multiple pods of multiple hundreds of long beaked common dolphins were in the mix! Dolphinitely over ~1000 dolphins in the area making a MEGAPOD!
We wished them happy eating following the drop-off Northwest splashes were sighted and we caught up with a very busy pod of ~300 short-beaked common dolphins in travel mode! Lots of little babies were in this pod. Always a crowd pleaser.
We have another trip with sunny skies and calm seas, so come join us!
-Naturalist Ruth
We had a fabulous sunset trip this evening with gorgeous sunny skies, and incredible ocean visibility! We started out to the west, where a nice big pod of common dolphins found us (LOL) and raced up to the boat. We spotted more splashes out in the distance and found a larger pod, where the two pods joined together. Seems like some sort of dolphin meeting happening that we weren’t aware of!!
We kept cruising out to the west, and I spotted some more dorsal fins of my personal favorite— offshore bottlenose. These guys were super spread out over at least a mile, showing off with lots of jumps, and some individuals surfacing nice and slow alongside the Privateer! It was really cool getting to show our passengers the size difference of the commons compared to the bottlenose, as the bottlenoses’ size takes lots of folks by surprise!
We slowly cruised off from the bottlenose and out to the SW for a bit, before finally turning towards home. We hung out with one suuuper chill mola mola, the largest bony fish in the world! The water visibility made for some spectacular photos. However, Captain Austin spotted a HUGE bird pile for us as the sun began to set, and we went over to check it out! We found 5 different sea bird species, along with more long beaked common dolphins. This scene also made for some very peaceful photos and moments, as Captain Austin shut off our engines to let us take in some nature ASMR!
We’ll be back at it again tomorrow, I hope to see y’all on a trip real soon!
Naturalist, Olivia, Greg, and Ruth
