We started off the day in the same place we found the whales the previous morning. Sure enough, we found humpback whales in the middle of the Golden Gate Strait near Point Bonita.
Initially I saw one spout, but soon I was seeing four spouts. A few more minutes passed and suddenly I was counting nine spouts from Point Bonita back in to the Golden Gate Bridge.
A powerful tide pulled us in, and we experienced large swell. We saw very few flukes from the whales.
Two of them were the same pair we had been seeing all week – Gator and Topspot. They continued to surface near us.
One whale surfaced within 100 yards of us. This whale breached once, then fluked a couple of times. It was spouting once every 1-2 minutes. We saw lots of harbor seals and California sea lions in the strait as well. One of them had caught a fish and had large groups of birds overhead.
On our way in, we spotted a spout by Yerba Buena Island. We moved slowly towards our dock. Suddenly a gray whale surfaced about 100 yards away from our boat, then disappeared. The whale continued travelling west.
The wind picked up for the next trip. We found 3 of the same whales we had been watching earlier near Diablo Cove.
A few huge container ships passed by. We kept a conservative distance so that the whales and the ships both had plenty of room to maneuver around each other.
There were huge numbers of birds, harbor seals, California sea lions, and harbor porpoises. We followed the whales at a distance as they slowly moved west.
-Allison
This post was adapted from a blog, read the original here
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