Thar She Blows

On Thursday, I attended the monthly meeting of the Monterey Bay Chapter of the American Cetacean Society. They had a special guest who gave a presentation of her experiences photographing humpback whales on the Silver Bank - a place off the Dominican Republic where you can legally snorkel with the whales.

I got all inspired and decided I needed to go whale watching again, so on Saturday morning, I decided to check the weather out and if suitable, try and get on the morning whale watch cruise that lasts four hours.

So, 7am arrives and I go down to the lounge to check out the weather - the marine layer is in, but it's high and the bay looks really calm, so I call Monterey Bay Whale Watch. It takes a few calls to get past the busy signal, but once I do, I find out that there is room, so I'm booked on the 9am trip.

Time to get up, shower, eat breakfast, pack the camera and wander the mile or so down to the wharf to catch the boat.

My initial weather observations carry on through the whole trip - it's easily the calmest trip I've ever taken on the bay - it was almost lake like in how calm it was - and this is the Pacific Ocean! The flat calm of the ocean combined with the overhead marine layer meant that everything was a similar shade of gray, which meant that spotting none gray things was easy.

With that in mind, we soon found a humpback whale - which was fairly close in to shore and in the middle of a massive flock of birds on the surface.

The whale didn't really dive deep, so it kept on popping up close to the boat - however, the lack of deep diving meant that it didn't raise its tail into the air on a deep dive, so from an action point of view, this whale was somewhat boring, but as it kept coming up close to the boat, boring is definitely the wrong word.

Here it came up close and we got a good shot of its blow hole - and given its closeness to the boat and the lack of wind, its fish breath lingered over the boat a few times for longer that anyone on the boat would have liked.

The whale did follow a few of the usual whale protocols, and after two or three breaths, it typically dived deep - where it arched its back as it went down.

However, we soon realized it wasn't really diving deep, it spent a lot of time at or close to the surface, and soon the marine biologist on the boat explained it all to us. The humpbacks (and the birds) feed on krill (a small shrimp like creature about 2cms in length max) and the small fish (anchovies and sardines) that feed on the krill.

The reason the whale and the birds were around was the combination of the small fish and the krill, and a few times during this time, the sea would seemingly boil and you'd see a pink haze (the krill) pop out of the water and lots of small fish chasing them.

Below, purely by luck, I managed to catch one of these "boiling" events, and you can see one of the krill towards the left in the middle of the frame (and a few out of focus ones in the top right of the frame) as the small fish chased them to the surface.


Our trip was scheduled for four hours, but ended up being closer to five. In my true geek way, I took my GPS watch with me to track the path we took to see how close we got to the massively deep canyons that exist just off the coast around here - the major reason there's so much diversity in marine life.

I used Google Earth to create the image below, the red trail being the path we took - the red area is where we followed the humpback and the birds as shown above, the green area is explained below, and the gray area towards the bottom is saved for last.

The closer in to shore trace is us going back to the harbor at the end of the trip.

Before we get on to the green and white areas of the map, let's spend a minute on the birds. The vast majority of the birds sitting on the ocean were Sooty Shearwaters - a bird that spends all its time on the ocean except when reproducing - which occurs in New Zealand. So these birds are here for the summer from New Zealand (which is a 16 hour flight by commercial airliner from here, so I have no idea how long it takes them to fly here!).

Given their long range, I assumed they'd be consumate fliers, but they struggled to get into the air as the boat approached them (some of them just dived and slipped under the boat as it passed overhead).

We also saw a couple of Albatross - these birds are also ocean dwellers, but they have a large wing span (84" - over 7 feet!) and are easily spotted in calm days like today was.

After the red zone, we headed towards the massive marine canyon that exists in the bay, the edges of which produce a big up swell in nutrients and therefore also in food chain feeding. We saw a small pod of Risso Dophins (far left green bit on map), then we headed back to where we'd been before as another boat had found a large pod of Rissos. There were approximately 500 of them, and we're in the middle of them - they surrounded the boat.

A couple amongst the ones close to the boat started breaching, so I shot away - apparently all the scarring on their bodies is just them fooling around with each other.

After we spent a while with the Rissos, we headed back off towards the canyon edge looking for more wildlife. We spent a while without results and then headed south as another boat had found a true find. Once we got down there, we got a rare treat, a blue whale - the largest animal that exists (or has ever existed) on planet earth.

The white area on the above map is where we followed this blue whale. Like other whales, they spout a few times before diving deep, but unique to blues, their regular dives are 8+ minutes in length, so they're hard to track from the surface. There aren't many of them either, so finding one was indeed a rare treat.

The blues feed on the krill we saw above, though the krill are only 2cms in size, so the whale eats tonnes of them every day.

In the photos below it looks like we were close to shore - and we kind of were, but if you look at the map above, you'll see that we were above the Carmel Canyon, so even though you can see the shore in the background, the water depth was immense, and presumably the krill were abundant.

As you can see in the above phot, the blue's spout is large - about 30 feet tall! The whale spouted two or three times and then dived for around 8 minutes, in which time it could have changed directions multiple times. We got lucky in that we got to see it come to the surface on three different occasions and two of the three were fairly close to where the boat captain guessed it would appear.

As per the humpbacks, the blues arch their backs before they dive deep - as witnessed in the photo below.

So, in conclusion, you can view today's trip in two ways - we only saw two whales and they didn't do anything that exciting, or as I came away believing, we got to view the whole marine food chain from one of the smaller creatures (krill) through to the (rare) largest animal on the planet, which feed on krill (how weird is that!?!) - the blue will eat tonnes of krill per day - plus we got to see rare birds, unusual birds and a tonne of dolphins, on a day where the weakest of sea legs would have held firm - I had a really good day on the ocean!

Snake on the Trail

I normally go mountain biking in the morning, but it was cold and misty this morning, so I decided to stay at home and watch Monaco F1 qualifying instead.

It was still chilly this afternoon, but I went for a ride anyway - I guess it must have warmed up a bit as I ran across this snake on the trail. I approached slowly and once I realized it was a garter gopher snake (benign!), I got close enough to take this photo.

It was about 2 feet long.

Once I'd snapped the shot, I rode around it and carried on for the rest of my ride.

Sea Otters

I managed to go for a wander in the evening and originally planned to go down to Cannery Row and wander along and then home again along the rec trail. However, I stopped off at the Monterey Plaza hotel to see if there was anything cool going on in the ocean under their deck.

I got lucky, there was a mother and child sea otter in close. The baby kept diving down and spinning around at the surface as the mother would dive down properly, crab a crab or a clam, come back to the surface, munch away and when the kid pestered her, would give the kid of a bit of the crab or the clam - the kid would then munch away on that bit while the mother went and got the next course.

I watched for about 15-20 minutes and the mother got through about 7 crabs and 3 clams.

I needed to get home, so I just walked back up the hill again and never did do my full route.

Weekend at Sears

This post is very late, I have to admit, but after a weekend of racing, plus a full week of work, it's been rather hectic.

Got to spend the weekend up at Sears Point, these days known as Infineon Raceway, for the AMA Superbike championship.

It turned out to be a hot weekend - temps well into the 90's with suspicion that it hit 100 (38 Celcius) on both Saturday and Sunday at the height of the temps.

Regardless of absolute amounts, it was hot, but thanks to the new organization running the races, there was basically a three hour gap in the middle of the day on both Saturday and Sunday which mean I got chance to enjoy the air conditioned press room and recover from any heat excess I might have endured.

Here are the photos from the weekend 8 page guaranteed to cure insomnia:
Friday Morning
Friday Afternoon
Friday Superpole
Saturday Morning
Saturday Races
Sunday Morning
Sunday Races
More Photos from the weekend

More Weekend Musings

It's been raining on and off all weekend long. I took advantage of the wet weather to finish off some tasks inside the house.

I got my old set of speakers from the Santa Clara house about a month or so ago (it wasn't being used any more) and used part of my tax refund to buy a new amp, so now my living room has Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound, all linked up via HDMI cables, so both the satellite TV and the DVD player are hooked into the system (as is the TV of course!). It took over 100 feet of speaker cable to wire everything up (the back right speaker wire had to go around three walls so that it could be kept at the edge of the room), but now it's all good!

So, after that was all done, I did a bit of spring cleaning too, to get the living room back into a fairly clean and tidy state.

Most of Sunday morning was wet, so I watched the Liverpool game on TV, went grocery shopping and then watched a hockey game on TV.

By the middle of the afternoon (the hockey game went to triple overtime), the weather had dried up, so I went for a wander to get some fresh air. As I was going down the hill, I realized I had company on the opposite side of the road from me.


Eventually, the deer crossed the road (causing a couple of cars to have to slow right down) and then disappeared up an entry that I had just walked past.

I headed down to the coast where the ocean was flat calm, wandered out to where the seals are pupping and watched the baby seals for a while, then headed home again - a nice 3 mile wander and some fresh air.

Since I've been back home, I watched the MotoGP race from Spain - and now I'll get myself some tea!

Condors Again!

Hopefully folks reading this blog aren't getting bored with Condor updates, 'cos here's another one.

This weekend we've had rain on and off - it rained hard Friday evening driving home and there was still a bit of drizzle Saturday morning, but it cleared up around 10am. There's a stream of storms coming in off the Pacific, but they're sub-tropical, meaning they're warm storms, so even though the rain came, the heating in the house got turned off and on went my shorts!

By Saturday afternoon, the weather was dry and warm, though still overcast, with more rain forecast for Sunday, so if I wanted to ride the Ducati this weekend, it was now or never, which basically meant now!

My normal Highway 1 route was fairly bereft of traffic, and I did get lucky in spotting a cop car hiding out off the side of the road and managed to get back to legality before he spotted me.

I stopped at the condor spot and there were three juveniles in the trees above the house. One of them flew and I managed to get the shot below.

It soon returned, and eventually all three were on the roof of the house investigating some buckets and a big yellow plastic bag. While it was kind of comical to view this, it was also disturbing as I've been educated by the biologists over the months and they say that when the condors ingest garbage, it inhibits their ability to eat real food as the garbage sticks in their craws (is that the right word?) and basically diminishes their food capacity and slowly partially starves them.


From where you can view this going on, it's too far away to do anything about it.

I spent about 30-45 mins watching the birds, then hit the road and continued on my ride. The ride itself was a lot of fun give the lack of traffic, though the fog was coming in here and there, so when the road dropped near sea level, I ended up just kissing the top of the fog.

Given the weather forecast, I ended up having an excellent Saturday.