Whale of a Tale

I planned this trip with a very different vision than what we ended up experiencing.  I wanted a last summer vacation that had no hiking, no outings, no plans.  I wanted to just sit at either a beach or a pool for 3 days straight and rest up.  When the first beach we drove up to on the first day offered us this amazing treat of a lifetime, our plans kind of changed.

We were told to check out the Moss Landing State Beach because, if we were lucky, we could see the Humpback Whales that have been on an anchovy feeding frenzy there for the past 2 months.  The below map shows how the Soquel Canyon, where these gazillion anchovies swim around, has a long finger that reaches right to Moss Landing.  In fact, this deep, nutrient-rich canyon ends just 60 feet from the shore!  

We walked up and immediately saw tons of spouts on the horizon line.  About a dozen whale watching tour boats were trolling the area too.  The abundant spouts were cool enough to make us excited and plop down in the sand to keep watching.  Well, as we watched for the next several hours, we saw that the Humpbacks were EVERYWHERE in the water!  And they were close enough that we could watch them breaching, tail slapping, and lunge feeding with the naked eye (though the binoculars and camera zoom did make the viewing even cooler)!  The following pictures were taken from shore.  With my non-fancy little Cannon.  And with my hands trembling from the thrill of this incredible sight!

Humpbacks are baleen whales.  They don't have teeth.  They just scoop up their fish food by the ton and let the water sift back out.  One way the whales do this is by lunge feeding.  When they rise the font half of their bodies out of the ocean to eat fish on the surface, the water they just gulped runs out of these special gills under their mouths.  You can actually see it in the above 2 pictures.

The knowledge of this daily Whale Show changed my "lay in the sun on the beach and do nothing for 3 days" plan.  This beach was cold and because of the huge waves and currents, not safe to swim in.  We still made it to different beaches for a bit of play, but the majority of our time was spent here, watching the whales, with no regrets.  We've seen some cool stuff, but Dave and I totally agreed that this was the best wildlife sighting of our lives.

Oh yeah, besides whales at this beach, there were also millions of birds, hundreds of seals (happy to share the schools of anchovy the whales were herding), and huge rafts of sea otters in the estuary connected to this piece of shore.

A morning in Santa Cruz gave us more wildlife views.  We got up close and personal with the entertaining and noisy sea lions on the wharf, and we watched dolphins jumping around this cove for a long time.

Being in this area, the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, had Delia asking why we haven't gone to the aquarium in a while.  By the end of our vacation time we could tell her, "We don't need the aquarium!  Look at all the exciting ocean life you saw for free in just 3 days!!"