At the end of December 2017, I was driving down highway 1 in Big Sur looking for Grey Whales to take photos/videos of because I hadn’t seen any during that season. After a while if driving, I spotted a solitary spout close to shore so I pulled over, brought out my drone and filmed a solo grey swimming south along the coast.
I didn’t want to use all of drone batteries on a single whale so after about a 20 minute encounter, I packed up my gear, hopped back in my car and cruised further down the coast. I continued to see one or two spouts along the coast but I wanted to try and find a larger group of Greys. Just as I drove through Lucia, I noticed a large cluster of spouts not moving off the coast. I immediately flew my drone out to the spouts and sure enough, there was a herd of 12 grey whales.
Swimming slowly down the coast. I had never seen this amount of whales in one group before so I was ecstatic! I filmed this group for almost 30 minutes until I was out of batteries for my drone. I could see the bull whale leading the group and any direction he went, the group followed. A truly incredible experience!
-Daniel
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