Warm sun, chilled air, and a slight land breeze made for pleasant conditions this morning aboard the Pacifica. The first hour and 10 minutes of the trip was a pleasant boat ride, but hardly any marine mammals were to be seen. We saw a few harbor porpoises that surfaced once before doing their characteristic dive and disappear. After an hour and 10 minutes, Captain JJ spotted our first blows of the trip. Just off the southside of the submarine canyon, about 3 miles west of Moss Landing, there were 3 humpback whales spouting. It looked at first like there may be some feeding activity going on, but soon after we arrived the activity seemed to slow. The trio began making their way toward shore, and we followed, soon after we saw more spouts! The trio lead us to another 4 humpback whales, and several rafts (groups) of sea lions. We observed one of the whales do a tail throw, sending up masses of white water as it came crashing down on the surface. We watched a pair of humpbacks make many surfacings before diving back down to feed 50 feet below the surface. We ended our trip with another trio of humpbacks further to the west. The great thing about this trio was that we saw several side lunges as the whales gobbled up mouthfuls of tasty anchovies! We took a roundabout home ranging to the southwest in the search for dolphins. Unfortunately no dolphins were to be found today. On the day we had about 15 humpback whales, if you count the spouts we saw in the distance!
–Naturalist Fredo
