Whale Watching - Another Look

This is a Pacific White-sided Dolphin, one of a large group that was bow riding alongside our boat on an SFBay Whale Watching trip a few weeks ago. Photographer Ed Estes’ timing was perfect, capturing the playful dolphin in mid-air. Right now Gray Whales are migrating south to their breeding grounds, and we are seeing them on our trips, but I wanted to show you some photos from the Fall season just past that I never got around to fitting in. Because these are some of Ed’s best shots and prove what we’re always telling you, that a whale watching trip is about more than whales.




We often see dolphins on our trips, and the Pacific White-sided Dolphins are truly crowd pleasers for lots of reasons. Their markings seemed etched with india ink, crisp layers and lines of grey and white and black. We've seen mixed groups of these dolphins and Risso’s Dolphins of up to 400. The two species are often seen traveling together. Your best bet to see that might be to book a trip in the late summer when we go beyond the Farallon Islands out past the Continental Shelf, but you never know - we’ve seen the mixed schools near the Farallones too.



Here’s one of my favorite photos of a male Elephant Seal - he’s resting in a cove on Southeast Farallon Island. For some reason mostly Elephant Seals seem to use this particular cove to haul out, I’ve rarely seen sea lions there. But then a male Elephant Seal could outweigh a male California Sea Lion by more than 3,000 pounds. "Cute" isn't a word normally associated with elephant seals but look at that face, oh, come on?!


Try as I might, I could not get a clear photo of a moon jelly (jelly fish) one day back in September when the ocean seemed full of them. Ed managed just fine. Mostly they were a foot or so beneath the water’s surface and unless the sun shone and the chop subsided my camera just wasn't going to focus. It wasn’t just the camera that didn’t “see” the jelly fish - not many people seemed to see them either because they were busy scanning the horizon for whales. Until someone called the jellies to general attention, and then hundreds appeared (where they’d been all along) below the surface of the water.


And this is essentially what our passengers were looking for - the exhale, or “blow” of a whale. If all the whale blows were this height and in this lighting we’d never miss a whale sighting, no whale could ever hide behind a big ocean swell! Even Ed was surprised at this shot, all that horizon gazing paid off.


These two Humpback Whales from last Fall choreographed their dive just in time for this shot. I tried for the shot too but I was in the back of the boat and photographing another group of four. Turning too late for the shot, I heard passengers exclaim: “two whales' flukes at once! that’ll be the shot of a lifetime!”....doggone it... You can see from the widely varying markings why fluke identification works like fingerprint identification.


Finally, I want to show you one of my favorite of Ed’s recent photo’s - a Humpback Whale, vertical, twisting as it goes down, flukes high (indicating the deep dive to come) and all set with the Farallon Islands as the backdrop. Somehow this image seems removed from us, the whale watchers. Only about the whales, and timeless.

Photos by Ed Estes. Text by Kathleen Jacques.

And the Good News is:

The good news, despite the recent oil spill in San Francisco Bay, is that passengers on SF Bay Whale Watching trips have been sighting marine mammals in the Gulf of the Farallones as usual, and in abundance.




As an example of that vitality take a look at these extraordinary shots that photographer Ed Estes took last Sunday of some California Sea Lions leaping clear out of the sea - something we’re far more apt to see during mating season...I’m no marine biologist, but hey, doesn’t it just make sense?


That’s a Blue Whale’s flukes you’re looking at in the photo above. This has been a good season for Blue Whale sightings so far, the counts seem higher than last year although I haven’t seen any official records. It gets to me every time I read the opening line in the Blue Whale chapter of the Audubon Guide to Marine Mammals of the World: “ Blue Whales are the largest animals ever to live in our planet’s history.” Think massive dinosaur, then think bigger...way bigger.



Another superlative for the Blue Whale is their loud voice - the loudest in the animal kingdom. Their low-frequency sounds are capable of traveling hundreds of miles in deep water. Researchers cannot say with certainty if the whales emit these sounds as deliberate communication or to image underwater features such as seamounts for orientation and navigation.



There were Humpback Whales out last Sunday too (see photo above). Good thing because Brent, second from right in this family group portrait, was gathering material for an “in-depth” school report on marine mammals. Family member Theresa Daniel (on the far right) was taking photos - that report’s looking like a sure-thing “A” to me...


Photos by Ed Estes. Text by Kathleen Jacques.