[CINC] Saturday January 17th - Islander

[bill weinerth]

Four sitings of common dolphins - 500+, 1000+, !000+, then a megapod.
Seven grey whales, possibly involved in courtship behavior.  We saw them in the morning in the AI/SCI gap and again in the afternoon between east AI and Pt. Magu.
They were mostly traveling at the surface with frequent spouts and shallow flukes.
The ocean was glassy calm. Visibility was over forty miles.
Tom Flor and Bill Weinerth were the naturalists.
 
In the morning we had close to one hundred passengers.  Twenty eight were headed for SCI.  Among the SCI folks was a special couple.  He picked the island trip as the place to ask her to marry him.  When we got back to the dock there were about thirty of their friends waiting with congratulations signs and plans to take them to a party.  The surprise was that the couple was not on the Islander since the Vanguard did the pick.  Good news was, Vanguard was not far behind Islander!
 
Both AM and PM trips included visitors from other nations (New Zealand, England, Germany, India) and other states (Virginia, Colorado, Ohio, Texas, Minnesota, to name a few I recall).
We had several babies and a good number of small children.  On the afternoon trip Tom set up "kids table" with crayolas, papers with pictures to color and whale models to examine.  This kept them busy on the hour long trip from the up-close look at East AI.
 
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