Blue Ocean Whale Watch - Moss Landing, California - August 16, 2021
Our friends, Bruce and Karen, arranged for a whale watching trip through Blue Ocean Whale Watch out of Moss Landing, California. We headed out of Moss Landing early in the morning, gray scattered sky with cool temperatures, but the crew was quite excited because a number of Humpbacked whales had been feeding in the waters reasonably close to the shore.
Cormorants just hanging around …
The flurry of humpbacked whale activity was nothing short of amazing! The whales were working together in twos and threes to round up the schools of anchovies and force them to the surface. It was literally raining anchovies on the surface of the water … like a monsoon down pour of the silvery little fish. The whales would do “lunge feeding” where they would lunge forward, mouth a gap, swallowing as many anchovies as possible while the sea lions roiled the water to scoop up the disoriented anchovies that managed to escape being eaten by the whales.
The whales would blow water in fountain-like spouts. Some adolescent whales where repeatedly breaching the water … seemingly because it was just the thing to do. Other whales would roll and wave a very long flipper at us. We found Aurora (female humpbacked whale) and her calf (Fluke Skywalker) cruising the waters eating their fill.
As the Captain and Naturalist of our vessel said, we were all now spoiled and might never again have such an enthralling experience!
I tried to capture some of the action without great success … I was just too mesmerized (and the whales were too quick) by all of the amazing whale activities. Finally my camera battery died and I could just enjoy the astonishing antics of these enormous cetaceans!
1 comment:
Amazing. I want to do this in HI in December.
Post a Comment