On Sunday, our first day out of San Diego, we saw a whale breaching just a couple of hundred yards off the starboard bow. We could only see a bit of its back "fin" or ridge and the puff of vapor they blow into the air when exhaling, but we saw these twice in relatively quick succession.
At the time we were perhaps 300 miles west of California so it was likely a California gray whale, a species which births their young in the warm Gulf of California and when we saw it was likely headed for its icy Alaskan summer feeding grounds. They. make this migration twice a year, once in each direction. Others of the same species hang out around Maui in the Lahaina Roads channel in winter. The California Gray is a long distance swimmer for sure.
