Whale Watching

Lucky the whale takes a look at us!

Carrie explains whale behavior.

Back in May, Jasper and I went to an OMSI science pub where Carrie Newell spoke about her work with Oregon's summer resident gray whales.  Ms. Newell is a professor of marine biology at Lane Community College, and owns a business taking people out to see the whales in her 6 passenger Zodiac boats from Depoe Bay. She has done extensive research on these whales, determining that there were definitely summer resident whales where no known food supply existed, and then determining what they were eating.  (She had to collect and analyze fecal samples...don't ask....) She can recognize more than 70 of them and knows their personalities and habits!  She even published a guidebook to make identifying individuals easier. It was an amazing talk, and we definitely wanted to splurge on one of her whale watching tours.  On the day we went, we had some wonderful luck.  Although we were disappointed that Carrie would not be captaining our boat, it turns out that the particular trip we went on was a luckier one for whales.  It had been very, very foggy that morning, but by our trip the fog had lifted enough that we had great visibility.  But it was still overcast enough that we did not have any problem with glare.  Gray whales can rarely be found in what humans would consider close proximity to each other, but we saw two different whales, and had many, many sightings of both of them.  By law, tour boats are not allowed to get very close to the whales.  But both of the whales were curious about our boat and poked their heads out of the water to look at us, and one came quite close before we could back away.  We loved Mike, our captain. He shared plenty of information with us about the whales, but mostly just let us marvel.  

Jasper thought the boat ride itself was awesome!

When you look out over the ocean, it looks like a vast, empty plane.  But we discovered even the surface was thick with life.  Bull kelp was growing in thick patches, reaching up from the bottom all the way to the surface.  Marine birds were floating on the waves.  Sea lions swam playfully by. And the whales were utterly magnificent!  They were very hard to photograph, because they were busy eating at the bottom, coming up for seconds only to quickly breathe.  It was hard to believe these astonishing creatures were near enough to see, aware of our presence.  Here are the better pictures I took.

Carrie captaining her Zodiac.

A whale's blow misting the air as it arches its back for a dive.

It showed us its flukes!

I have quite a few pictures of whales as they arched their backs for a dive.

More whale flukes.

Murres.