Capt. Dave's Ocean Report

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

July 14, 2008

Another awesome week for common dolphins, they were everywhere! . Almost every where we went this week there were small feeding groups of common dolphins. See photo of a common dolphin upside down, pushing itself out of the water as it catches a fish in its mouth taken this week.

We are also seeing lots of calves; tiny little loaves of bread swimming around with their mothers. They can have their calves all year long but most of them are born in early summer.

We saw three blue whales on Friday, or I should say I saw three blues with my binoculars but because of time constraints, (and disappearing hard to follow whales), only a few of my passengers ever saw them – that was really frustrating! Thank you Avispa for the call on those. We had an awesome dolphin encounter and had I not got everyone’s hopes up, after spotting those blues, everyone would have been very satisfied. Oh well.

I neglected to tell you two weeks ago that Mike on the Helena spotted a whale swimming near the surf off Aliso. When he called me on the radio to tell me about the whale, I told him I was a bit surprised because I had never seen one (referring to blue whales) that close to shore. He casually replied that they saw them in the surf all the time. And I said, “yea gray whales, but not blue whales”, I said. “It is a gray whale” he matter-of-factly replied. Now I was really surprised I had just thought I was surprised before. Last year we had a couple of gray whale sightings in the summer too, which was a first for us and very unusual. These whales usually pass by Dec – April. This one was either a late migratory whale or one that was staying in our area foraging - if so we haven’t seen the last of him.

The red tide is still going on, I have heard reports that it goes all the way down into Mexico. Check out the bioluminescence before it’s gone.

That’s it till next week. May God bless you. 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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