While I’ve seen great white sharks around the Farallon Islands off San Francisco, this encounter was quite a bit closer than those other occasions. Our shark swam very calmly alongside our boat, with the captain keeping a slow pace with the animal. The adults can get fifteen to twenty feet or more, truly massive animals. We also encountered a young great white shark, “only” ten feet long. (Unlike the gray whales, who give birth in the waters of bays along the Baja coast, humpback whales go further south and give birth at sea.) There is also some interchange with the humpbacks who feed mainly in the Gulf of Alaska and migrate to the Hawaiian Islands to give birth.
Humpbacks along the California coast head south during the winter months to breed and give birth to young off the Central Coast of Mexico. Truly a great occasion to celebrate the return of the humpbacks to Central California! In recent years, humpback whales are practically a guaranteed sighting every time. These sightings were still marginal – I would guess 25% to 50% of my trips around this time did not see any humpback whales, try as we did to find them.īut today, both humpback whales and larger (and impressive) blue whales are very common visitors to Monterey Bay and offshore San Francisco. By the early 1980s, a few began to appear and were eventually common enough that summer and fall cruises of San Francisco to the Farallon Islands could advertise sightings of humpback whales. The species had been virtually eliminated along the Central California coast.īack in 1976, when I started running whale-watching trips for the Sierra Club out of San Francisco Bay, we seldom would see any humpback whales. Finally, with international protection by the IWC, only 4 humpback whales were found and killed in 1965. In 1961, only 67 were found and harpooned. But after that, the numbers killed began to fall.
In a chart he notes that in 1956, 133 humpback whales were harpooned, with 199 being slaughtered the next year. Dale Rice reported (in “The Whale Problem” (1974) edited by William Schevill) that these shore stations took a large number of humpback whales during those years, only stopping when the International Whaling Commission (IWC) ordered all countries to cease killing humpback whales in 1965. Three shore-based whaling stations, one in Monterey Bay and the other two in San Francisco Bay, hunted for the great whales during the 1950s and early 60s.ĭr. The presence of humpback whales in Monterey is a major conservation victory. As an extra treat, we also encountered a great white shark. We spent quite a long time watching a pair of humpback whales – a mother and her calf – feeding on anchovies in the bay. I recently went on a whale-watching cruise in Monterey Bay, leaving from the small city of Santa Cruz.
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