On Tuesday morning we were out on Monterey Bay to go whale watching and there we watched a whale lunge feeding and another working with sea lions to feed.
Our cruise through the Panama Canal started in Fort Lauderdale and would take us to Aruba, Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico and finally San Francisco and then onto Monterey.
Breakfast and Fisherman’s Wharf
The Internet in this hotel can be hard to use. At 4 am I was unable to sleep and I tried for an hour to log in and gain access. After selecting the service there is supposed to be a log in screen on your web browser. I was unable to get Safari to connect to the web service…
Our room was a non-smoking room and no pets with hundreds of dollars of charges threatended if the rules were broken. Next door we had a barking dog that wanted walkies at 6 am. And then wi-fi started working perhaps someone had re-booted the server?
Breakfast was served in a room close to reception that had been a public restaurant at one time. As we had to be at the Wharf early we drove around to the front of the hotel. There were bagels, bread, cereals, bananas as well as coffee, juice and hot water for tea.
After breakfast we parked close to Fisherman’s Wharf and went to the office to sign up and pay for our first trip out onto the Bay. Our boat was to be Blackfin which was a large catamaran. As we had been booked on the earlier 8 am trip we received a 20% discount on our tickets.
We were told that Humpbacks were still in the Bay but there had been no sightings of dolphins or Orcas. The Grey whales had yet to make their journey from Alaska down to the Gulf of Mexico.
While we waited I walked around the pier and spotted this sea gull raiding one of the fishermen’s bins.
On Blackfin into Monterey Bay
We joined the queue waiting to board Blackfin and while we waited we were introduced to the morning’s naturalist who would be advising us on what we saw in the bay.
As Blackfin left the harbour we paused to look at the cormorants and bachelor sea lions that were massed on the breakwater.
Blackfin then set off out into the Bay.
Two humpbacks breached way out in front of us – far too sudden for any of us to grab a picture, but I did see the splashes! Whale watching is definitely a ‘wait and see ‘pastime and over an hour past before we saw another blow.
Our first encounter of whales in Monterey Bay
