A friendly humpback whale comes close to the Condor Express so you could see its knobby head.
I’m losing my concentration after a day of such enormous abundance of marine life in the Channel…I put on a Gerald Wilson album and am siting down to record the day in words. Captain Dave “The Man” Beezer sniffed around the same area where we had all that marine life yesterday and quickly got the Condor Express in the midst. The enormous concentrations of life are still there, but more dispersed over a wider geographic area. One difference: in addition to the gigantic mega-pods of long beaked common dolphins that are mixing it up with all the humpback whales, there are a few smaller pods of short beaked common dolphins on patrol in the Channel as well.
As for humpback whales, Dave and I decided to low ball the population total to fifteen, because we don’t like to exaggerate and, in fact, we did closely observe only a mere fifteen beasts. Truth be told however, the big hot spot had another 5 or 10 animals out on the periphery of the activity center, and thus there may have been a lot more than 15 here. We also encountered a separate group to the east on our way back from the Painted Cave on Santa Cruz Island. We followed two, and there were at least two more just ahead of the boat. It was during the homeward bound humpback encounter that we had a friendly animal surface next to the Condor Express a few times, rolled around in some drifting giant kelp, and waved its enormous pectoral limbs in the air.
Rounding out the experience today, was a very calm ocean surface with tiny-to-none waves…glassy for the most part. It was overcast but we did not get the drops of rain we had yesterday. It was a magical grey day. As you can tell from the title of this message, one of the highlights of the trip for me was being able to witness and photograph common dolphins riding the humongous bulbous bow of a massive Maersk container ship in the northbound shipping lanes. These dolphins are fearless ! …and the Condor Express remains the best place in the world to see all these cetaceans.
I’ll post my photos sometime tomorrow. https://www.CondorExpressPhotos.com
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