I’m going retro with this blog until I get caught up a bit. I promise I won’t go back to my childhood.
On August 10 I went out with Monterey Seabirds to Monterey Bay. It was another foggy day, but that’s what we get this time of year. The seas weren’t flat, but they weren’t bad. You need a bit of wind if you want tubenoses to be flying anyhow.
At one point we had lost sight of land and were cruising about 8 knots and had thousands of Sooty Shearwaters and hundreds of other birds cruising along with us. We also had hundreds of Pacific White-sided and Northern Right Whale Dolphins and a couple of Humpback Whales doing the same, but they were mostly in the water.
I commented to Jeff how cool it was and he said, “Yeah, it’s liking being back in the Eocene.” There was barely any indication of human presence, aside from our diesel-fume-spewing boat, and these animals have been doing this for thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of years. It was easy to just be present and enjoy the spectacle of life around us.
I’ve been out on Monterey Bay for almost ten years and have yet to get a good photo of a Northern Right Whale Dolphin. Today they were “porpoising” a lot and close to the boat, but it’s really hard to anticipate when one will come out of the water, and by the time I see one and get the camera in position, it’s too late. So I tried a new technique of just holding the viewfinder to my eye, focused on the water, finger on the shutter button and waiting. Eventually a dolphin came into view and I jammed the button down. Here’s what I got:
Northern Right Whale Dolphin
