WT&G No. 7: Gone Whale Watching! A Quick Look at some of the amazing things I saw on three recent trips

Welcome to Whale Tales and Glitter Issue# 7. Are you reading this on the web or did you get it as a forward? If you Subscribe you’ll get all the whale-y goodness sent right to your inbox. If you’d like to support Whale Tales and Glitter there’s now a ko-fi page 

Hello all,

This issue of WhaleTales and Glitter is later than I had planned for a number of reasons, the first being three days of whale watching in April that resulted in over 2K photographs. Taking them was a lot of fun - oooh the things I saw! - but processing that many pictures always takes more time than I expect. In addition, being a person with chronic illness my recovery time after trips can be complicated and hasn’t been helped by life and family stuff, nothing awful, just distracting. And then there’s the new website my hubby and I have been working on…

New Website!

I’ve learned a lot about creating a newsletter in this last year. I appreciate all of you who have joined in and encouraged me along the way. Among the notes from myself and others is that I need to trim the newsletter down a little and focus my thoughts a bit more. As I am a member of the “Rabbit Hole” club of research and writing, and prone to digging into many things at once, I’ve decided to split the longer threads, and more random explorations, off to their own blog. These will now live over at Deep Dives with Whale Tales and Glitter

There you will find:

• Spotlights on interesting and important folks in Marine Biology

• Trip Reports the full write ups of my whale watching and science related trips

• Deep Dives into anything and everything related to whales and the oceans

• Aquariums with reviews of the aquariums I’ve been / will be visiting

There’s a fair amount of stuff already posted, with more to come, come. I hope you’ll take a look: Deep Dives

Birthdays are for whale watching!

Being an Aries baby, my birthday and the beginning of humpback whale season in Monterey Bay overlap enough to do a, now annual, whale watching trip. This year we arranged a three day trip in Monterey, CA with lovely down time in between THREE whale watching trips. We had an amazing time and saw so much wildlife! We got to see Fin whales, a first for me! A pod of Orca and their newest calf! And incredible Humpback whale sightings. Three trips in three days was tiring but SO worth it.

With three trips in mind, I decided to take each trip with a different company, one we’d never been out with, one we’d only been out with once, and one that we have been out with most of the time, to see what was different about each of them while seeing lots of whales!

Our whale watching itinerary:

Discovery Whale Watch Wednesday 4/16/25, afternoon trip - We’d never been out with these folks but I’d seen their postings on line and liked that they used small-ish boats with a low number of passengers per trip. Afternoon trips tend to be a little shorter than morning trips, but the views are just as spectacular. Trip Report

Blue Ocean Whale Watch, Thursday 4/17/25, morning trip - I’d been out with these folks in 2018 and had a great time. Unlike the other two companies, BOWW leaves from Moss Landing which is a town at the midpoint of Monterey Bay, at starting point of the deep canyon that makes Monterey Bay the diverse environment we love. Because that part of the canyon is so narrow, it can sometimes mean faster access to whales, it certainly did for this trip! Trip Report

Monterey Bay Whale Watch Friday 4/18/25, morning tip - I’ve been out with MBWW most of the times I’ve visited Monterey Bay and loved every trip, so rounding out our adventure with them was an easy choice. We also got to introduce one of my husband’s coworkers to whale watching in Monterey Bay. Trip Report

We saw A LOT over three days. The full details of each trio are linked above for folks who would like more information and way more photos :) For now, here are some highlights of our trips:

Humpback Whales:

On Day One we saw a group of four or five Humpbacks not too far out from Fisherman’s Wharf. They were relaxing and diving for a meal repeatedly in 4 to 5 minutes intervals. We’d see their blows- white/gray puffs of water vapor from their blow holes, then see their dark backs and their distinctive hump. After they rested for a few minutes they would arch their backs and slowly sink below the surface. Sometimes they’d lift their tail flukes all the way out of the water and we would see the patterns on the underside of the flukes, each an identifiable mark like our finger prints.

On Day Two we came across a single Humpback whale doing one of the more exciting things whales do: breaching, or hurling themselves out of the water, twisting around and landing on their backs with a giant splash. The bigger the whale, the bigger the splash. This one was doing breach after breach interspersed with a few pec slaps: when they lay on their sides and raise one of their long pectoral fins into the air then dropped down, making a different kind of big splash. On one of their breaches they came up right in front of a small whale watching boat drenching everyone!

I sent several of my tail fluke photos to HappyWhale.Com for identification. Of the photos I sent, six of them came back with ID’s and locations they’ve been previously spotted, including one who has been seen in both Monterey Bay and the waters off Mexico where this group of Humpbacks meet up to breed and give birth.

Orca / Killer Whales

The big treat on Day Two was seeing a pod of five Killer whales or Orca (both names are correct). The group we saw is part of the Biggs Killer whales or Transients, so called because they have no specific home residences but travel along semi-regular routes, stopping to feed, rest, and play in areas like Monterey Bay. Specifically this was a pod called the CA140Bs. CA for California, one of the areas they are often seen. 140B being the numerical name given to the matriarch of the pod: a large female nick-named Louise. With Louise were her three daughters and a calf who was four to six months old. The calf was later identified as a female who is the baby of one of Louise’s daughters, making her Louise’s first known Grand-baby… Grand-Orca? While these Orca don’t have a regular schedule of visits to the Bay, anytime there are large groups of whales with babies in town, there’s a good chance one of the Transient pods will stop by.

Velella velella

On two of the trips we saw a seagoing being that I’d heard about but never seen: Velella velellas, also known as By the Wind Sailors. At various times of the year these very small, surface dwelling creatures get blown by storms from the tropics to other, cooler, waters around the world. They are are small drifting critters related to jelly fish, sea anemones, and corals. Both days, the crews were able to scoop up a bucket of Velella velellas and sea water so we could see them up close. We even got to touch them!

Fin whales

The highlight of Day Three was a sighting of the second largest whale on the planet: the Fin whale. Fins are long, lean, baleen whales averaging 80 feet. They are known for being fast swimmers and sometimes referred to as the grey hounds of the sea. Being gray on top with only their small dorsal fin showing as they rest at the surface, its easy for them to blend in with the water and sky. From the boat it was hard to process just how large they were. We knew from the blow spout that there was a whale, but Fins are on the reserved side. Mostly they feed, rest, and hang out. We’d heard that there had been Fin whale sightings on other days in the week with the whales apparently following one of their favorite foods: krill, into the bay. I have to admit I was keeping my fingers crossed that they’d come back again so we could see them. I was SO glad they did.

Spotlight: Mary Anning, Paleontologist

I first learned about Mary Anning on a trip to the National History Museum, London, UK in Sept of 2024. One flight up from the Blue whale skeleton hanging in the grand entryway, is the gorgeous, wall mounted Plesiosaurus skeleton Mary Anning discovered in 1823.

Born in 1799 on the south coast of England, Anning spent much of her life exploring the shoreline looking for fossils with her father and brother. Anning would make sketches of her finds before they were sold to well-to-do tourists. Of course, as both a woman of her time, and a member of the working class, Anning’s scientific contributions were mostly ignored or credited to her wealthy, white, male, fossil collecting customers. Her writing was never published in any scientific journal with exception of an excerpt of a letter correcting the Magazine of Natural History’s editor on details about a prehistoric shark known as Hybodus. And while her work helped establish the the Geological Society of London, the society refused to admit her and only allowed women access in 1904, nearly 60 years after Anning’s death.

Today Anning is known as ‘the greatest fossilist the world ever knew’. In addition to the Plesiosaurus, she was the first to correctly identified an Ichthyosaurs skeleton. She found the first remains of the pterosaur: Dimorphodon, and pioneered the study of fossilized poo .

For more on Mary Anning: Link

And Glitter!

Since I tend to think of glitter as anything that brings a sparkle and joy to the world, and the worlds needs more of both right now, I offer this bit of ‘glitter’ which has been helping me stay focused.

Thank you all for coming on this journey with me,

Kate