Another gorgeous day in paradise. Great humpback whale sightings including a special guest from Alaska.

Image: a beautiful, yet somewhat lazy half breach by a humpback whale in the Santa Barbara Channel.

2025 08–26 SB Channel

Captain Eddy reports ideal conditions today: Sunny, calm seas, and a very light breeze in the afternoon. The crew took a course straight south from the Hope Ranch area out to the very edge of the lanes, staying slightly west of the farm. Here are the totals: 4000 common dolphins, 50 California sea lions and 9 humpback whales (we closely watched 4 of them).

A 1000-strong common dolphin nursery pod was found just a mile from the shore. They seem to be in travel mode. So fun to see all the juveniles! Dolphins were be seen throughout the area, especially as we got into the birdnados. There were scattered groups of sea lions feeding alongside the birds and dolphins and whales.

We investigated a large birdnado 3 miles outbound. We found our first whale here. This led to 3  more individual whales, a short distance from each, other along our southern path. There were plenty of others in the distance that we did not get a chance to explore closely. The first 2 were juveniles and, like the rest of the whales, were feeding subsurface. Humpback number two came close to the Condor Express and did a half-breach enjoyed by all.

The third whale was interesting. It was larger than the previous two and, due to the research skills of our deckhand Isabel, we found that it had previously been recorded only 4 times. In August 2024 it was seen twice in the Aleutian Islands of Alaska. It is relatively rare to get members of the Alaska/Hawaii stock coming to our area, and most come from Hawaii (we’ve had two from Hawaii already this week). I cannot remember an Alaskan humpback in our area before. (It’s ID is HW-MN0430168 if yo’d like to look it up yourself).

You never know what mother nature has in store.

Bob Perry

condorexpressphotos.com

Note: kudos once again to Isabel. She works hard as a deckhand, she spots whales, then she photographs them and puts them into www.HappyWhale.com to provide real time identification.