That is right! A real Grey Whale! It was so cool, it was spouting and everything.
My Biology class went to Bodega Bay to the Marine Lab and to collect fun things off the floating docks. For lunch we went to the Bodega Head and had Lunch at the beach, and that is where I spotted it. He was there for a while, moving slowly along the coast, coming up every few minutes to spout.
This is really cool for two reasons. The first is that I have never seen a real live whale before, and I have always wanted to. I have even been contemplating going without food for a while to shell out the bucks to go on a whale watching trip. But, I don’t have to now because I got to see one, and it was pretty close, too. Which leads me to reason number two.
The whales aren’t supposed to be this far south yet. He was also way closer (not too close, don’t worry) to the shore then he should have been. By all things natural, I should not have seen him on that trip, but I did, and it was SO cool!
Anyway, I just figured that I would share my excitement with everyone.
For those interested who want to see whales up close and personal (especially grey whales), I highly recommend a trip to Baja. I’m hoping to go again someday. The website of the group I went with is here.
My fish biology class took a trip to Alert Bay (Northern Vancouver Island) two summers ago. We saw a minke whale from far off, but couldn’t find the right depth for the plankton net to see what it was eating. A couple days later we were at the Hanson Island Orca research station, which had sonar sensors in most of the inlets. They picked up 2 or 3 pods of killer whales coming, and we had enough time to load everyone onto the seine boat and move up the channel. We saw a couple dozen whales coming from about 500m away, spotting the spray from their blowholes with binoculars. They kept coming right towards us, and it took about 10 minutes for the pod to reach our boat. The pod split, and went around our boat, surfacing all the while. I got lots of pictures of the killer whales surfacing no more than 10m from the boat. They kept on going right up the channel. It was a bright sunny day in late August… just perfect. I’ve never felt the urge to go whale watching since; it couldn’t have gotten much better than that:).
