9:00am- Wow, what a beautiful morning! Some light offshore wind made for sunny skies and extremely calm water. We couldn’t wait to get started. Captain Larry on Ocean Explorer had already found a humpback whale for us, about 1 mile from the entrance. We hung out with this smaller humpback, one that we didn’t recognize, for about a half hour. It was making longer dives and only up for a few sequences, although we got a couple of good shows of its fluke. Then Captain Ryan went out to sea looking for dolphins. About 4 miles out he spotted some birds in the binoculars and we went to investigate. Upon arriving we found 50 long beaked common dolphin and another humpback whale! This was “Scarlett”, the humpback which had been tangled but now is free. We got super close; it was our best encounter with this whale yet!
11:30am- We wanted to go back out to see “Scarlett” but Captain Larry informed us that the whale was moving away, about 9 miles distant, so Capt Ryan pointed the boat towards Laguna. Our friend Royce had found a humpback feeding with dolphin. He waited for us to get there and handed another humpback whale off to us. We also saw two seperate pods of dolphin on this trip: about 150 short-beaked common dolphin and 200 long-beaked common dolphin.
3:00pm- The beautiful weather continued through the afternoon, and Captain Larry came to run one of our Zodiacs, so we had two boats running. Ryan was out first and found the same humpback from the 11:30am trip off Laguna Beach. It was showing great and our passengers loved it. We also enjoyed a pod of about 200 long-beaked common dolphin.