San Diego, Day 3: Boats

[amethyst73]

You should be able to see photos from today here, or you can click any of the images below to get to the album.  (I think.  Clicking on the images will at least let you embiggen them.)

The first part of our day was spent on a 3-hour whale watch run by San Diego Whale Watch.  The sea was pretty choppy, and I didn't feel comfortable taking my phone out to get pictures most of the time that we were underway, but it was still a pretty neat trip.

Two funny-looking people on a boat

Shortly after we boarded but before we got underway, one of the harbor seals came up close to the boat and showed off for the crowd.  At one point, it was basically right underneath me, which was pretty neat.

Aren't I cute?

As we were pulling out of the harbor, we passed the bait dock, which was fairly long and which was filled mostly with birds, including some snowy egrets, pelicans, and cormorants.  There was a handful of sea lions out at the end as well.

Many birds on the bait dock

Sea lions at the bait dock

Once we got out of the harbor, we soon came across a smallish pod of common dolphins, which was pretty neat.  There were young ones in the pod as well as adults.  I was able to get some not-very-good video footage of the dolphins, which I'll post later.

We briefly saw what was likely a young blue whale, who sounded shortly after we saw his spout.  We didn't see that one again; it might have been spooked by a Navy guided-missile boat that was making tracks through the water.  (One interesting fact that our naturalist told us: the Navy puts more money into whale research than any other institute does!)

After some messing about, we hit the equivalent of pay dirt: a whole pod of ~7 blue whales that surrounded the boat, all of whom were spouting fairly close by!  We saw their long backs, and one even showed its fluke briefly before diving.  It was pretty cool.  Summary: There are real honest-to-gosh whales out there in the sea.  We have seen them!

San Diego coast


Pelican at the dock when we returned

We had lunch in the tiny but tasty little cafe/restaurant at the launch, then headed back to town.  We rested for a while, then walked down to the waterfront to make a closer inspection of some neat-looking historical ships that we'd briefly seen while trying to make our way into town a couple of days ago.

The ships both turned out to be part of the Maritime Museum.  We chose not to go in, but we could get fairly close to the boats nonetheless.  The Star of India, a shipping vessel, is the one with the sails up in the album.  It was a merchant vessel that shipped timber out from California.  The other old ship was, we gathered from a sign on a beached bowsprit, the Surprise - a war vessel.  There were also a couple of undoubtedly-historical submarines, but we didn't take as close a look at those.

Star of India at a distance


Star of India up close


The Surprise


Huge Navy ship, looked like an aircraft carrier

Comments

[hoshikage.livejournal.com]

Oh, I wish I'd looked at LJ a couple days ago - it's probably too late now, but when we were growing up and visiting La Jolla/San Diego all the time to see my grandparents, aside from Sea World the other thing we did basically every time was the science museum at Balboa Park (whose name I cannot currently remember... *looks it up* There it is! The Fleet). We loved the Omnimax films (completely spoiled Imax for me tho :P) and the Exploratorium-like interactive exhibits to play with. The Zoo and the Wild Animal Park are also, naturally, amazing. I hope you've been having a great time!

[amethyst73.livejournal.com]

It's okay. :) We pretty much planned 3 fairly full days with the things we've now done. Perhaps we'll come back some time and pay the science museum a visit!