A Great Day at Sea!

Saturday, July 12, 2008 SFBay Whale Watching hosted members of "Seaflow" for the third of four scheduled trips. Seaflow is a nonprofit organization that works to curb ocean noise pollution. Passengers got a chance to listen to vessel and marine mammal sounds from hydrophones lowered off the boat. Seaflow discussed the findings of their prior testing and their efforts to protect marine mammals from loud, life threatening noises.


It just so happened that six California Sea Lions were ready to leave their sanctuary at the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito that day too. It was time for the rescued and rehabilitated juvenile sea lions to return to their home at sea.

Lucky whale watching passengers got acquainted with the young sea lions as deck space was shared on the way to the Farallon Islands. Sounds like a party to me.


Carol Keiper, senior Naturalist on the trip, gave her usual fascinating descriptions of animals encountered along the way and shared some real baleen (the filter inside the whale’s mouth that strains gulped food from the water) with the passengers.


As if hydrophones and hitchhiking sea lions weren't enough, there were the plunge-diving-off-the-stern Brown Pelicans and the just-off-the-bow Sea Nettles.


Photographer Ed Estes got these extraordinary pictures of the Sea Nettles right below the water’s surface.

Sea Nettles can be hard to spot in the water and even harder to photograph, but conditions were just right and passengers got yet another treat.

For more of the Seaflow story have a look at the article the San Francisco Chronicle published the next day. And I'll be posting more of Ed's photos from the trip too; it was an exceptional day also for photographers! Oh, and did I mention that we saw too many Humpback Whales to count...

Photos by Ed Estes. Text by Kathleen Jacques.