Two great trips on a Tuesday!
With beautiful calm seas we headed to the south beyond the drop off chasing scattered seabirds on our afternoon trip.
On the horizon about 2 miles away we saw the most enormous splash from a humpback whale throwing its tail! We jetted over there trying to catch up with this magnificent animal “tail-lobbing” and got to see such a wide variety of behaviour including it rolling in the kelp or “kelping”. It switched between its consistent dive cycles of 4 breaths at the surface before taking a deeper sounding dive for 7 minutes and 2-3 minute split dives. This humpback also spent some time “logging” just below the surface and showed it flukes on about 50% of the deeper dives into the beautiful Pacific Ocean.
On the sunset trip the sun finally came out and we journeyed to the west.
The bird life was also pretty quiet later in the day but we did enjoy a parasitic jaeger and some red throated phalaropes among scattered California brown pelicans and gulls. Long-beaked common dolphins came to join in the fun! Scattered pods were following food towards the south and raced over to the Privateer porpoising through the waves to bow-ride. In total there was about 500~ long beaked common dolphins!
We ended the trip with a gorgeous sunset featuring a green flash AND watched the harvest moon rise out of the hills large and orange, it was truly stunning.
All and all an awesome day on the water with both baleen whales and toothed whales.
More tours this week, come join in the fun.
-Naturalist Ruth
