2020 06-14 SB Channel
Captain Colton and his crew ran two trips today, one at 9 AM and the second one at noon. The 9 AM trip started out quite rocky with winds from the south blowing again swells from the west, but fortunately everything laid down within the first hour and it became quite nice.. Skies were sunny and blue. Sightings for the day included 1000 long-beaked common dolphins, one humpback whale, and one giant blue whale.
Dolphins were scattered throughout the Channel in small feedting pods. Some were racing off in search of bait while others were actively feeding. It is always fun to watch them chase their prey, then fliip upside-down and lunge grabbing the fish with their long jaws, sometimes out of the air.
Both of the big whales were seen on the afternoon excursion. Captain Colton ran pretty far to the southwest and ended up near the mid-channel NOAA buoy. Our first sighting was a very large humpback whale that fluked-up several times and was very fun to watch.
In the distance, looking out to the south near the islands, there were additional spouts. A large spout was spotted directly in front of the boat and about a mile and a half away. It disappeared and we started the timer but couldn’t find anything in that area for 15 minutes. You veteran whale watchers will know that when you have a whale with that long of a downtime it might be one of the big whales. In this case it turned out to be a giant blue whale. We had good looks on its first surface interval, But it stayed down a little less the second time, and then we had a wonderful second deciding where you could see the beautiful blue water shining below the surface and of course it came up for air regularly. Wow!
You never know what Mother Nature has in store.
Bob Perry
Condor Express, and
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