On our afternoon trip, we had choppy seas and two great sightings. At the Mission Bay Channel entrance, we saw a half-dozen Nearshore Bottlenose dolphins foraging for fish and surfing some of the swells toward Ocean Beach and the cement pier.
Ten miles offshore, over the Coronado Escarpment known as “Nine Mile Bank”, we came across 40–50 Offshore Bottlenose dolphins foraging and playing with the waves produced by our boat the motor vessel Inspiration. This includes our wake and the pressure wave generated off of our bow. We witnessed, for me at least, the greatest leap and breach of a bottlenose dolphin of entire summer. The splash was very close by and our passenger guests were oohing and aching the entire time, as more breaches occurred. This could be showmanship, dominance hierarchy, courtship display or likely, just plain fun! The cumulus clouds were spectacular, it almost looked like they were going to turn into cumulo-nimbus or storm clouds, but that is not in the forecast.
On our sunset trip, we had our first departure time at 4:30 PM. Early summer it was 5:30 PM . Now with the shorter day length, we have a sunset at 7:10 PM. We went northwest off the coast of beautiful LaJolla and Captain Brian found us a super-pod of about 1,100 common dolphins. Amongst all of these hungry toothed whales was two fin whales and a breaching humpback whale. The humpback whale breached a total of 6 times with a couple of tail throws thrown in to entertain our excited passengers.
There were thousands of seabirds including the black-vented shearwaters, brown pelicans, Brandt’s cormorants, Heermann’s Gulls, Western gulls, Elegant terns and a couple of Pomarine Jaegars chasing the birds that just caught a fish. This was an all-you-can-eat ocean buffet table of epic size. The small schooling fish are the anchovies and sardines and others, becoming food for all of our feathered and flippered friends. We saw a few ambitious California sea lions feeding with the dolphins, likely locating the baitball of fish by the vocalizations of both the dolphins and whales, which are acoustic and find each other by the sounds they make. The human passengers made a lot of sounds as well. We hope that you had a great time and that you give us a follow on our social media and tell a friend or two about an enjoyable way to witness the fecundity of the mighty Pacific Ocean here in Southern California. —Naturalist Greg McCormack
