A lovely day to go on a whale watch. We enjoyed seeing our flippered and feathered friends within the Quivira Basin, a parking lot for vessels. Captain Bryan brought us out into the Mission Bay Channel for some good scenery in transit to the Pacific Ocean.
About 4-miles offshore, we came across a cow-calf pair of humpback whales. The mother and baby were intrepid and showed us some really cool behaviors. Mom took time to do some “kelping”, a type of “spa treatment” for a bit of exfoliation of skin, using the stripes, blades, floats and holdfasts of the giant bladder kelp and elk horn kelp.
The calf breached 3 times, twice on the port and once on the starboard, all quite close, within 150 yards or so. Each time was unexpected as it occurred 15-minutes between each of the breaches. The whales didn’t appear to be feeding as there was no birds or sea lions in the area and we were in about 200’ of water depth. We were close enough to hear the respirations and could tell the difference in lung capacity between the larger female and young calf.
The calf showed us its tail numerous times. We could see all of the round barnacle scars on the underside of the tail flukes. We did get some good identifying photos to send in to “Happy Whale” dot com.
December is absolutely a delightful time to go whale watching. Hope to see you out there on a whale watch soon. —Naturalist Greg McCormack
