Spectacular warm glassy sunny conditions helped us find lots of wildlife including 6 gray whales.
- Bob Perry
- 4 hours ago
- 2 min read
2026 04–18 SB Channel
It was short sleeve weather in the Channel today, especially on the 12 N excursion. Seas were glassy. A 9A trip also left the dock. Other than a single foray offshore, captain Eddy and the crew methodically explored the coastal zone with an eye for gray whales. As you can see from the following numbers, this strategy paid dividends: 500 common dolphins, 5 California sea lions (not counting the buoy), 6 gray whales, and one ocean sunfish (Mola mola).
Most everywhere we went the glassy blue ocean was festooned with little gems or jewels called purple sailor jellies (Velella velella). Often, these animal colonies were spread out with a few inches to a few feet between them. But along the edge of some of the tidal fronts, they were gathered in the thousands. Perhaps randomly we observed a medium small ocean sunfish (Mola mola), a known Velella predator, in one of the relatively bare spots. Tautonyms (both parts of the scientific name, the genus and the species, are the same) are relatively rare in science.
Dolphins were in small pods and spread out everywhere we went. Some of the small pods paid attention to the Condor Express and it’s waves, and others swam by without so much as a glance.
We ended the morning excursion with quick looks at a single, small, perhaps yearling, gray whale. Unfortunately we were out of time, but we already knew we would catch up with it.
We found it again 45 minutes into the afternoon trip and followed it from More Mesa W to the Goleta pier. In deeper water S of the pier we watched one of the larger dolphin aggregations, perhaps 200 of them, busy feeding while being bombarded from the air by elegant terns.
By this time some of the boats from the harbor informed us of a mother and calf that they had been watching off the Mesa. When we arrived on the scene we did indeed find a nice kind of cooperative and regular cow calf pair. They were very close to shore and the hardest thing for a photographer was to wait for their individual breathing cycles to coincide so they could be photographed together on the surface. (see today’s photo above). Bingo. We hit the jackpot. A second cow calf pair was following hours, perhaps a quarter mile behind them. So naturally we turned around and followed those for a while as well. This is the time of year when the gray whale season comes to an end with the moms and their newborn calves being the last of the Mohicans.
You never know what mother nature has in store.
Bob Perry
