[CINC] Double Dolphin 05-11-08 Trip! Bottlenoses!

[Christopher Carlson]

Howdy CINC crew,

So today I headed out on one trip for a Mother's Day whale watching trip.
The cloud cover was a solid 100% all day and there weren't too many beach
goers or surfers in general. Captain Richard and first mate Athena were
great handling the full boatload of around 50 or so, from all over Southern
California, and even one group of 8 from Norway! The Norwegians were
complaining about the cold weather... Explain that one!

We stayed pretty close to the harbor, because we encountered a good number
of Bottlenose Dolphins surface feeding, showing off their flukes, and slowly
milling around the pier area. The people got a kick out of their aerobatics,
so it was a good treat, even on a pretty cold sea! We didn't see any larger
cetacean than that, but the people seemed satisfied, especially the kids
aboard, who were quite...verbose in expressing their love and knowledge of
all things ocean. The others were entertained just listening to these kids!
And we all had good laughs at the California Sea Lions that couldn't
quiiiiiiiite jump high enough to reach the buoys and just plummeted back
into the water.

Great Mother's Day trip, despite the lack of any "whale" action. But
dolphins are more than entertaining enough to make up for it! In fact, there
was one guy that Athena had nicknamed "Brownie" because he was a
distinctively brown Bottlenose (I missed seeing him myself). She speculated
it was the offspring a Bottlenose that had mated with a Common Dolphin. Oh,
Nature! What games you play!

I hope you all had a great weekend, and see you at the next meeting! :-)

Chris Carlson
chrisjamescarlson at gmail.com
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