On Sunday Sam and I drove to the Malibu Pier to use the whale watching tour tickets we’d bought months ago, and had to reschedule in March when our first date was rained out.

Here we are on the Pier waiting to get on the boat:

Here is Sam on the boat moving away from the Pier:

Unfortunately the end of April is when the whale migration is almost over, so we were informed that we may not even see any whales (of course, we wondered whether this meant we’d be receiving our money back…).  However, within a few minutes we spotted a “footprint” and followed a mother and her calf.  We followed them for a few miles (it was a 2 hour tour).  After the first half hour we noticed there were dolphins that had spotted the family as well, and were accompanying them on their journey.  At one point one dolphin came within twenty feet of the boat, surfaced and swam back to the whales.  That was as close as we’d get to anything.  The whales were always at least 100 yards or more away and we’d often lose them for awhile before they would pop up again far ahead.

the most we ever saw of the whales were their backs as they would come up to blow out some air.  For some perspective on just how big they are and what we COULDN’T see – see the photo below I stole from google images:

see that little notch on it’s back where the tail starts to curve?  That’s the notch you’ll see in the photos below.  So, all we ever saw was maybe 10-20% of the length of the back of the whale.

The first photo shows what my “real” photos look like and the rest are cropped.  I don’t have a zoom lens on my camera – so the situation was not ideal.  I quickly learned that I had to put the setting on continuous speed shooting or I was going to miss the whales due to shutter lag (when they pop up they’re only there for a split second).  Unfortunately with the speedy shutter setting (there is a slower one, but the interval was too large to capture the whales) the focus and image correction aren’t so hot. I actually used up the entire 8GB card, taking about 500 photos and had to look back through and delete while we were still out there to make space for “if” we got closer later on.

So you can see in the above image the little black line “near” the shore (that the arrow points to) – and I’ve enlarged it so you can see what it is.  In the nonenlarged version you can’t see the dolphin leading the whale at all.  Even though I lacked a zoom lens, because my new camera has the larger Sony”alpha” DSLR sensor I was able to just crop down in photoshop from the full size 14MP photos (I was shooting in RAW mode) to get some decent shots of what we could (kinda) see with the naked eye:

After getting back we wanted to go somewhere and have a “snack” and warm up before hiking. It was 50+ degrees on the pier – but the wind on the water was blowing pretty hard – so wind chill probably took the “felt” temperature down another 10 or 20 degrees.  We decided to walk across the street and go to the King’s Fish (or something) restaurant across the street as it looked more “snack”-ish than the “Beachcomber” restaurant on the Pier.  As we walked along the PCH sidewalk to the restaurant we saw a few of our boat-mates walking toward us… they had had that same idea – but, unfortunately, the restaurant was closed.  So – we had “snacks” at Jack in the Box.   The reason we had “snacks” is because our next destination was solstice canyon and we’d be walking a few miles before eating again.

At the canyon we stopped at the waterfall, which, since it rained the night before was actually more like a real waterfall than the other times I’ve seen it.

Since it WAS easter, we decided to go to “church” before heading up the hill.