Thursday, April 07, 2016

The Channel Islands: Better Than Sea World...



From the west side of the Rocky Mountains to the West coast takes us fourteen hours of 
driving with a few In and Out Burger stops along the way...


 getting to Ventura Beach right before the sun was sinking below the water.





A few days later, we moved farther west, this time by boat from the Ventura Harbor to see what we could see....




and it didn't take long with sea lions basking in the sun anywhere they could.





Soon, dolphins found us, dipping, diving and racing the boat.









Nothing is so thrilling as watching animals where they belong, do what they 
want to do, with no constraints.


Near one of the oil rigs that are paced off along the Santa Barbara Channel, a shallow shelf of a mere eight hundred and fifty feet or so, before the ocean bottom drops to thousands of feet, the show continued with a feeding frenzy on the surface of the water. Pelicans and seagulls swirling above...


 and ever so often, signaled by a puff of air...



A humpback whale getting a mouthful and then sinking back down under the water. 


Turning back towards the mainland, other puff coming up from the water, signaled grey whales, in a rhythmic migration north towards Alaska, making a long journey from the other polar cap. Able to hold their breath for upwards of 8-10 minutes between shorter repetitive breaths, we followed them and waited, rewarded several times with them resurfacing...





just showing the ridge of their spine or the tips of their tails. I wondered if that is all 
the ancient sailors saw, creating imaginative sea monsters...




When the tails came up high, that signaled a deep dive and the great whales disappeared into a world we can hardly conceive of, even now.











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