Whale Tale

I'd been reading that there are spots in southern CA where you can see whales from land, which is endlessly appealing to me because I get horrifically seasick on boats. So I ventured to Point Vicente in Palos Verdes, which is an official whale lookout site for the LA Chapter of the American Cetacean Society. This is a gorgeous cliff 125 feet above sea level, where the water depth abruptly drops off close to shore. In the winter months, official whale observers are there from dawn to dusk, 7 days a week, conducting a gray whale census.

My primary goal was to see gray whales as they pass by California on their famous migration. The whales swim ~5,000 miles from Alaska to Mexico, where they give birth to calves, and then swim another 5,000 miles from Mexico back to Alaska. I wasn't expecting to see anything on this day because most whales aren't expected to pass by until January, but I wanted to check out the area. Well ... I ended up hanging out with the whale watchers for several hours and we saw 2 whales! One was a southbound gray whale, which I could see quite well thanks to my recent investment in a pair of good binoculars. I learned so much from the whale folks! For example, the grays often follow a pattern of surfacing twice after shallow dives and then surfacing a third time after which they take a deep dive and don't surface again for ~10-20 mins. When you see the whale's fluke (tail) come way up out of the water, that means it's heading down for a deep dive. This gray whale wasn't far off shore and we were able to follow it for several dive sequences. Wow!! Incredibly exciting!!

The process of whale watching is interesting. Mostly, it's a waiting game. Sometimes, the observers sit out there all day and don't see anything. But then suddenly someone yells "BLOW!!!!!!" and everyone runs for their binoculars. The spout from a blowhole is the telltale sign. And interestingly, the blow is an important part of whale identification. We also saw a fin whale while I was there, although I couldn't see much except its back and fin because it was far away. Based on the fin shape and size, the observers said it must be a humpback or fin whale. They concluded that it was a fin whale because the blow was extremely high, which means the whale must be enormous -- a humpback couldn't generate a water spout that high.

The observers also see many different varieties of dolphins nearly every day. I saw some dolphin, but couldn't tell what kind. However, at one point someone excitedly yelled for everyone to look far off-shore. In the distance, you could see a huge swath of dolphins jumping in and out of the water. There were far too many dolphins to count, and they were excitedly leaping and jumping everywhere. I was informed that these are common dolphins, which travel in huge pods. The observors said that such pods can include hundreds or even thousands of dolphins. They claim to have seen one pod that was so big that there was a 2-mile long stretch of nothing but dolphins! TWO MILES!

Oh, and one other anecdote. I had noticed several pieces of (what I thought was) garbage floating in the ocean, but was informed that they were sea lions! Or more accurately, sea lion flippers sticking out of the water. Apparently, sea lions often hold one flipper out of the water to thermoregulate.

This was a total blast!! I can't wait to go back. I have hopes for seeing not only more gray whales, but also blue whales (the biggest whales in the world!), which the observers claim to see sometimes.