[CINC] Condor Sat. Jan 17, 2009

[Kevin Bailey]

18 + Gray Whales (1+2+6+4+ 2+2 + others in the distance)

250 Common Dolphins (200 + 50)

2 Dall's Porpoise

4 Bottlenose Dolphins

3 Blue Sharks

Today was another perfect day on the water. Fellow naturalist Scott Cuzzo
and I talked with people from France, Holland, N. CA, LA area, CO, NE, and
AZ.  Capt Mat, Dave and Dennis lead us on today's adventure with guests
Bernardo and Diane Alps of LA ACS. This was a better than usual crowd with
everyone exciting all day to see what was in the channel. The awesome
weather on shore stayed with us the entire day and no one was sick so that
makes it good already. 

We saw our first cetacean 10 minutes out of the harbor with about 200 Common
Dolphins scattered everywhere eating, jumping, porpoising and enjoying their
morning feeding session. We stayed with them a while since they were so
active and then continued toward the islands seeing 2 Dall's porpoise for a
quick glance. These were not the ones that wanted to be seen or
photographed. Most people missed them and I only saw one quick black blip
and that was it. On we go toward the SCI-SRI gap where we saw our 1st solo
Gray this side of the island. This whale didn't want to show us any action
so with several spouts toward the gap we continued on and came upon a pair
that we watched for a bit and then as we got closer to SCI we saw a couple
good sized groups. Once we were on scene, we had 6 whales to our immediate
left, 4 whales to our immediate right and stayed with these groups for a
while with lots of fluking. The group of 6 was very close to each other the
whole time.  We often saw 3-4 blows at the same time as 2-3 dives. We would
see many combos of flukes and spouts in a very small area. These whales were
swimming along the island toward Painted Cave so we followed them along the
island. While watching this group we could see many spouts behind us in the
1-2 mile range headed our way and/or toward the gap.

Although the sea was calm all day there was quite a surge immediately
against the island so we barely made it into the shade of the cave and were
not able to get a close look at it today. All day there were large numbers
of sea birds from the gazillion pelicans that have been hanging out at the
harbor to lots of auklets skimming along the surface. A woman from NE was an
avid birder and she thoroughly enjoyed the day watching all the wildlife and
loved the Peterson Flash Guide for birds of the West Coast from the whale
kit. I also gave her a couple other good locations for tomorrow to see birds
both on shore and at Lake Cachuma. We continued home toward UCSB and saw a
Blue Shark that quickly disappeared but then 5 minutes late we saw 2 more, 1
of which allowed us to observe its behavior for several minutes as it was
slowly cruising at the surface. We followed the coastline from just east of
Goleta Beach back to the to the harbor. Following the coast we saw 2 pairs
of Bottlenose Dolphins in their coastal positions.

Everyone on board was extremely happy with the day and several people
commented that they were amazed at how much wildlife there was to see out
here as well as the beauty of the islands. A couple locals were even amazed
and said that they had never been out in the channel even though they had
lived in SB for many years.

Kevin Bailey

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.rain.org/pipermail/channel_islands_naturalist_corps/attachments/20090117/b04066bb/attachment.html>