We never posted our whale photos from 2016, and we added only a few in 2018, so this post is a combination of both trips. (Caveat: all our marine IDs are our best amateur guesses informed by field guides and online sources.)
LEAP DAY: 29 FEBRUARY 2016
Every 4 years, people born on February 29 can celebrate
their real birthday. For them, leap day seems only fair, but for the rest of
us, it’s a bonus day. For a variety of reasons, on our 2016 trip along the Baja California Sur coast, we chose leap day to start
making our slow way back north,
having been cruising southward for a month.
We departed from tiny Ensenada la Ballena around midday and
have been motoring in light to no wind for a few hours. A queen butterfly
outpaces us, flying faster than the 5.9 knots that our 52-hp Yanmar diesel is
making. A single manta ray ghosts carefully past us, just at the surface, its
large pectoral fins pointed south. The weather is hot and still, so Sue is sitting up
forward in the shade of our bulky mast, scribbling and rescribbling notes for a
blog post. Curtis is in the cockpit looking at maps on the iPad and gazing
around. Cilantro is steering herself (on autopilot) toward Los Candeleros (the
candlesticks), a sequence of three tiny islands.
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| Manta ray off Isla Danzante, BCS. |
HUMPBACK WHALES
“Whale!” shouts Curtis, pointing west toward the Baja
mainland. “Spouting and sounding!” Sue puts down her notepad. Curtis drops the
boat speed to idle and joins Sue up forward. We scan the spot, nearly 2 miles
away, with binoculars. Unbelievably, a humpback whale suddenly breaches—surges half
or more of its body straight up out of the sea—and falls back onto the surface.
Then another one comes hurtling up, and another, and another. As we sit and
watch, alternately mesmerized and shouting, as many as 10 humpback whales hurl
themselves skyward repeatedly, singly or two and three at a time, thundering
back down with a smack that we can’t hear over the distance and our engine noise
but imagine we hear anyway.
This spectacular display lasts less than one minute but feels like thirty. As we continue watching, Curtis gets his camera out and the whales begin flipper slapping, extending their exceedingly long flippers straight up out of the water and slapping them down like giant paddles. From the length of the flippers (which can be up to a third of their body length) we can discern two or more larger whales plus several smaller ones, maybe mothers with their year-old calves.
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| Humpback whale flipper slapping. |
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| Humpback whale flipper slapping. |
Later we are lucky again: another humpback (or two?) breaches. This time we are much closer and get videos and stills of the action.
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| Humpback whale breaching. |
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| Humpback whale breaching - sequence of 7 photos. |
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| Humpback whale breaching, photo 2. |
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| Humpback whale breaching, photo 3. |
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| Humpback whale breaching, photo 4. |
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| Humpback whale breaching, photo 5. |
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| Humpback whale breaching, photo 6. |
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| Humpback whale breaching, photo 7. |
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| Curtis videotaping whale action with his superzoom camera. |
We celebrate the excitement with some chilled bubbly—a
couple of cans of seltzer—and motor northward. The wind is so light that we
don’t have to seek out an anchorage with protection from the winter-typical
north or northwest winds, so we head for Caleta Candeleros Chico, a tiny
north-facing cove with room for a single boat.
BLUE WHALES
Before we get there, however, we
spot more whales, this time out to the east of us in deeper water. Again they
are more than 2 miles away, but with calm seas and 10-power binoculars, we are
able to see vertical columnar spouts, long grayish backs, and no visible dorsal
fins. Hmm. Sperm whales? No, sperm whales have a forward-angling spout. Gray whales?
Probably not—they would be smaller and have a series of bumps along the back.
We watch for several minutes and finally see one that shows a tiny dorsal fin far from the blowhole. Blue whales!
We saw blue whales on several more days, a few of them close enough that we could see the vertical spouting, mottled gray coloration, and tiny dorsal fin only appearing after the blowhole has submerged. See the 3 sequential photos below.
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| Blue whale showing vertical spout. |
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| Blue whale back, with blowhole submerged but no dorsal fin visible yet. |
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| Tiny dorsal fin of blue whale, visible only after the blowhole and much of the back has submerged. |
Blue whales rarely raise their flukes when diving, but...one of them did while Curtis was videotaping.
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| Blue whale flukes, rarely raised for a deep dive. |
SPERM WHALE?
On our return crossing to Sonora in March 2016, we saw a solitary large whale that we thought could be a sperm whale, mostly because its spout was strong strong and at a 45-degree angle. But we didn't see much more of it (and it was going away, of course!). In particular, we couldn't make sense of the bulgy head shape behind the blowhole. Here are our best photos. Let us know if you can identify it!
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| Sperm whale? Gulf of CA off Sonora coast. |
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| Sperm whale? Gulf of CA off Sonora coast. |
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| Sperm whale? Gulf of CA off Sonora coast. |
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| Sperm whale? Gulf of CA off Sonora coast. |
FEBRUARY–MARCH 2018
Surprisingly, on our 2018 trip, we didn't see any blue whales. We saw two leaping mobula rays and one leaping manta ray, and a couple of entertaining humpback whales. This was a much shorter trip, so probably that's the major factor, but it might be that we were just very lucky to see as much as we did in 2016. Differences in weather, sea temperature, and food resources might also have played their parts.
HUMPBACK WHALES
Two humpback whales put on a great show for us as we motored north from Bahia Candeleros to Honeymoon Cove on Isla Danzante. They started by breaching (shooting out of the sea) sideways, then flipper slapping, and finally lobtailing (raising their tails straight up and then slapping them down). The seas were choppy, the boat was moving up and down, and the whales weren't very close, so Curtis had to work hard to get any zoomed video at all, out of which we selected a few frames of a tail slap. Photographed or not, humpback whales are the most entertaining cetaceans we've seen (although bowriding and leaping dolphins come close).
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| Humpback whale raising its tail. |
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| Humpback whale tail coming down sideways. |
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| Humpback whale tail splash. |
SHORT-FINNED PILOT WHALES
On our crossing of the Gulf to return to Sonora, just at dusk we saw a pod of about 12 whales that we are pretty sure were short-finned pilot whales! They were small (15–20 feet long) and dark-colored, with wide-based hooked dorsal fins and an awkward-looking bulge ahead of their flukes as they submerged between breaths. Too dark and distant for photos, but through binoculars they were exciting.
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Short-finned pilot whale [Image courtesy NOAA:
https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/species/short-finned-pilot-whale] |
