Gene “Tarzan” Smith encounters a blue whale outside Redondo Beach. Photo by Bo Bridges (BoBridges.com)
Craig Stanton was sitting on the deck of his condo overlooking King Harbor in Redondo Beach a little more than two weeks ago when something in the ocean caught his eye.
A white plume rose from the blue water not far from the harbor’s entrance. Stanton, a 100-ton captain and longtime harbor hand, was puzzled. He thought it must be the exhaust from a vessel. But no ship was in sight. He grabbed his binoculars and looked again. What he saw made his jaw drop: in just seconds, he saw eight spouts blowing sky high less than a mile away.
“Oh my god,” he said, putting the binoculars down and grabbing his phone. “Time to call the boys.”
The largest animals in the history of the Earth had arrived. Blue whales, as long as 110 ft. and weighing up to 200 tons, are not unknown in local waters. They frequently summer in the Santa Barbara Channel and sometimes a scattered few can be found off the coast of Palos Verdes. But never in living memory had a group of blues arrived here in these numbers or in this manner.
Stanton earlier this year was one of four local skippers who purchased the Voyager, a 65 ft. passenger boat purpose-built for this harbor. It has become known as the South Bay’s preeminent whale watching vessel. Whale watching in these waters, however, usually begins in late December and follows gray whale migrations. Stanton called his fellow skippers. Something strange and unusual was happening, he told them. It was time to launch the Voyager.
On that Saturday the Voyager set out from King Harbor on a voyage unlike any before in its 50 years exploring local waters. More than 20 naturalists from the Cabrillo Whale Watch program were on board. The excitement was palpable as the 65 ft. vessel cut through the fog and left the Redondo breakwater.
Diane Alps, a program coordinator at the Cabrillo Marine Aquarium who also serves as a volunteer naturalist for the whale watch program on board the Voyager, spoke on the ship’s intercom. She said blue whales are often heard before they are seen – the steep exhale of a blue can be heard from hundreds of yards away – but visible signs might also appear on the water.
“We are looking for fins and tails,” she said. “We are looking for any disturbance.”
A whale watching trip is an exercise in hope, wonder, and luck. Stanton formerly served as a charter boat captain in Mexico. He would take groups hundreds of miles up the Sea of Cortez in hopes of just a few glimpses of the mighty blue whales. After buying the Voyager, the new ownership hired another local captain to operate the boat day-to-day – Brad Sawyer, who during last year’s whale season logged a 98 percent success rate in finding whales on each trip (75 percent is considered a good rate).
“He’s got that fish sense,” Stanton said, noting that Sawyer’s experience as a former fisherman was invaluable. “It’s not something you learn out of a book.”
Sawyer was looking for current breaks and the telltale slicks on the water’s surface known as “flukeprints” – a flattening of the water that the movement of the blue whale’s massive tail creates when it kicks just below the surface.
He was also looking for so-called “whale birds,” a species called phalaropes that feed on the same crustacean – tiny shrimplike creatures known as krill – that form the bulk of a blue whale’s 8,000 pound, 1.5 million daily calorie intake.
“Bird life is really key,” Sawyer said.
And make no mistake: the whales are here for the krill. Some of the same conditions that had made for the uncharacteristically cool “bummer summer” also helped foster a rich krill bloom locally. Strong offshore winds created an upwelling, bringing cold water to the surface, particularly along the edges of the underwater Redondo Canyon that extends straight off Redondo.
Sawyer patrolled the canyon. A few miles outside the harbor a very large breath was heard. “3 o’clock!” one of the naturalists exclaimed. Everybody moved to the starboard side of the boat and saw an 80 ft. blue whale surfacing. Another surfaced right beside it.
Blue whales often travel in pairs. Another on-board naturalist – Bernardo Alps, the president of the American Cetacean Society’s LA chapter (who met his future wife Diane while whale watching in 1999) – noted that the male is nearly always to the rear of the female and is known to keep close proximity to her prior to breeding season.
“It is related to mating,” Alps said. “The male will stay with her weeks or months in anticipation of being able to mate.”
Soon somebody shouted “12 o’clock” and shortly thereafter “6 o’clock.” Two pairs of whales were right in front and behind the boat. They were feeding below the surface, rather than “lunge feeding” with open mouths along the surface. This meant that they frequently dove. In the course of the next 90 minutes, everybody on board the Voyager was treated to among the most impressive of whale watching sights – particularly for photographers – when the blue whale raises its flukes out of the water before kicking downward in a dive.
During the course of a three hour trip, the Voyager encountered seven flukes.
Stanton was amazed. In a decade of working whale watch boats, he’d never seen anything like it.
“This is phenomenal,” he said. “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience. This is just whale watching at its finest.”
The tail, better known as the fluke, is 15- to 20-feet wide. Photo by Diane Alps
What he could not have fathomed is that over the course of the next two weeks, as the Voyager began daily and sometimes twice a day trips, this would be the fewest whales it would encounter. One day last week the vessel found itself surrounded by more than 30 blue whales off the coast of Palos Verdes. All totaled, somewhere between 50 and 80 blue whales have arrived off the coast of the South Bay. It has created such a stir that a crew from the CBS Nightly News arrived to film the phenomenon.
Diane Alps said the network of whale watchers up and down the coast is abuzz with news of the congregation of blue whales that is occurring here.
“We’ve got a lot of blue whale out there right now,” Diane Alps said. “This is definitely where it is happening.”
