Capt. Dave's Ocean Report

As seen weekly in the Dana Point News/Orange County Register

May 26, 2005

The blue whales are back in town!
The blue whales are back in town!

I got a call Monday morning on my cell phone from Mike on the Helena, “We are seeing several blue whales about twelve miles from the harbor.” I took the lat, lon’s, (latitude and longitude), where he saw them last and let my other skipper know – (since it was my day off.) Just before trip time the Sea Explorer and Dana Pride called my skipper Bob to let us know they had found a blue whale about four and half miles from the harbor. Bob called me. Oh great! The trip leaves in fifteen minutes, I don’t have any of my motion picture equipment ready or my cameras or anything. For those of you who don’t know I am accumulating footage of blue whales for my next film – a dramatic feature film called ‘Blue’. I told him I did not think I had time to make it down there and then I rushed home to see if I could. I gathered everything up and made it to the boat before they needed to leave – (though being the owner I was in little danger of being left at the dock.) I plugged the ten-pound battery for my super 16mm motion picture camera in for charging and went down below to load one of the magazines with motion picture film on the rocking boat. The film has to be carefully threaded through a gauntlet of gears and registration pins, with part of it in a bag where you cannot see it – not a job for a rocking boat, but I had no choice. I finished the loading the mag and before I could get the cover on the guys found a whale. I heard Bob say it was a fin whale. I got out on deck and sure enough it was a finback. We were only about a mile and a half from where the other boats had left the blue so we followed the fin for a little while then went in search of the blue. We were on a mission: to see the largest animal on earth. Never mind the fin whale, the second largest animal, even if they do try harder! We got out to where the giant whale had been fluking and feeding but the party was over.

I spotted a pod of about 800 common dolphins about three miles away so we headed for the dolphin. When we arrived they were grouped very tightly together and feeding. Had we focused on finding the blue to the exclusion of the other animals I believe we would have found it but that would have robbed our passengers of seeing the most amazing thing there is to see out here: a big pod of dolphins. It was an odd feeling heading home with a boat full of happy passengers and feeling good about that, but knowing I would have to stay up into the wee hours, (4 am), catching up on the work, like this column, that I was supposed to be doing on my day off. The blue whales made me do it.

We saw several megapods of common dolphin this week and bottlenose dolphin.

Well, that is all until next week. God bless. This is Capt. Dave, over and out.

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Capt. Dave Anderson runs Capt. Dave’s Dolphin Safari out of Dana Point Harbor. He recently completed the award winning documentary film “Wild Dolphins and Whales of Southern California.” Capt. Dave will be sharing his photos and stories and letting us know what he and other skippers are seeing off the Orange County coast. For a daily log of sightings see www.dolphinsafari.com.

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