Blue Ocean Whale Watch
I went on my 2nd Blue Ocean Whale Watch trip this weekend down in Moss Landing. Since I never finished editing the photos from my first trip last year, I forced myself to edit these asap since we had such an amazing day!
If you haven’t been whale watching before, I highly recommend going, and I highly recommend going with Blue Ocean Whale Watch. They know exactly where to go and Kate the Naturalist on board (and a great photographer), knows everything about all of the wildlife you’ll see on board.
Just a shot of some boats as we left the harbor on our way out to sea!
Here’s a juvenile double crested cormorant!
Ahh! A flying Brandt’s cormorant! They have striking blue eyes and their throats are blue during mating season.
So thrilled to finally see my first “wild” sea otter! I’ve been on the lookout for one of these guys for YEARS and have had the worst luck spotting them… it was my lucky day, this guy was floating by as we made our way out to sea. Unfortunately we were moving pretty quickly so this is the only shot I got of an otter.
This sea lion was all alone swimming around really far away from shore…
Sea gulls feeding… they all began to take flight as our boat passed.
Yay, Risso’s dolphins! We didn’t see any of these dolphins on our last trip so I was really excited to see these guys.
If you look back towards the middle and to the left, you’ll see a gray whale! I was kind of disappointed the Risso’s didn’t come up a little farther out of the water. All of the other photos I’ve seen of Risso’s are of their cute round faces. Oh well, maybe next time!
Brown pelicans flying by…
It’s gray whale season! Last time we went on a whale watching trip it was humpback whale season, so I was really excited to add a new species to my body of work.
Gray whales are baleen whales, they don’t have teeth. They are more solitary in nature than humpbacks and so it’s kind of rare to see them in big groups. We were lucky and saw a nice group of 4 at one time (but I only managed to get 3 in one shot).
This whale was coming up so high each time you could see its mouth and sometimes its eye!
Up and down…
Three whales blowing at the same time.
Three whales blowing at the same time – the boat in the background was remarkably small compared to these giant creatures…
One of the few shots I got of a nice fluke almost straight on.
This seagull was following our boat and would glide in and out of the wind from our boat.
Jellyfish in the water! There were tons of them… glad I wasn’t swimming this day!
Yay another brown pelican, my favorite bird!
Returning to the harbor…
A long pier of <del>stinky</del> sea lions.
“Oh, I’ll just climb on top of everyone… can you see me now?!”
I don’t know what these birds are, but they were really cool!
