9 North Bay spots to see whales on northward migration

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, California residents traveled an average of 29 minutes a day between work and home, according to U.S. Census records, and 12% spent an hour or more on the road.

But that’s peanuts compared to the world’s longest commute — underway now along the California coast — 10,000 miles and six months round trip, and the commuters do it swimming. Thousands of gray whales are now making that epic journey, as they do every year, moving at about 3 to 5 miles per hour. Not bad for a creature as long as an 18-wheel semitrailer truck and 36 tons, full-grown.

From now through May, visitors to local coastlines can watch their leviathan progress northward, from several key spots. Unlike other whale species, the gray’s ocean “highway” is remarkably close to shore, making them fairly easy to observe.

Norma Jellison spends several hours each weekend during the gray whale commute doing just that, out on Bodega Head, as the whale watch coordinator for the Stewards of the Coast and Redwoods.

She sets up with a handful of other trained volunteers, as she has for 26 years, wearing “whale watch” vests, to offer information to anyone curious enough to ask what’s happening in the water just offshore.

“Most people who drive out to the edge of the Head don’t realize they’re able to see whales from here,” Jellison said.

Bodega Head is a high granite bluff with exceptional ocean views to the north, west and south. It’s an unobstructed spot for catching sight of the whales or, most often, the plume of vapor, or blow, that rises in a mist above the water’s surface when they exhale. Like all mammals, whales breathe air, and it’s when they come up to catch a breath that their white spout becomes visible from a distance for a few moments.

“People are surprised and excited when they see them blow or catch sight of their body,” Jellison said. “Folks actually jump up and down and clap. It’s thrilling. It’s pretty exciting to experience living whales in person, in the wild.”

Close to shore

The gray whales are here because of their unique lifestyle. Their marathon swim is actually a commute between their nursery and their dinner table.

Far north, in frigid Arctic waters west and north of Alaska, lies the gray whale’s smorgasbord, rich and silty seabed teeming with particularly nutritious small crustaceans called amphipods.

Gray whales dine by diving to the sea bottom, scooping up mouthfuls of silt, then straining the water and mud through a filter layer called baleen and swallowing the rest. The whales feed constantly for a few months in summer, before the seas ice over, storing fat in layers of blubber up to 10 inches thick. Then, around October, they turn south and don’t stop to eat again.

Their destination is a collection of warm saltwater lagoons way down in Baja Mexico, where they gather, mate and give birth to their calves in December and January. Whale gestation is about 13 months long, which means the females are typically pregnant swimming north and then back south, before their calves are born.

At birth, baby whales weigh about 1,000 pounds, and they drink up to 50 gallons of milk a day, building size and strength for two or three months in the sheltered southern lagoons before embarking with their mothers on the long swim back to the icy waters where the adults can feed once again.

“Mothers and young calves swim more slowly and stop to rest and nurse in quiet coves along the coast,” Jellison explained. “They hug the coast where they can, to protect the calves from orcas, which are their only natural predators besides humans. The mothers stay between the open sea and their calf. The orcas hunt by echolocation, using pulses of sound, so by shielding the calves, they stay hidden.”

A calf will nurse for roughly seven months and stay at their mother’s side for nine. Female gray whales are known to fight ferociously to protect their young. To whalers, who twice drove the grays to near extinction, once after discovering their nursery lagoons in the 1800s and then in the commercial takes of the early 1900s, they were known as “devil fish” for their aggressive defense.

Whale-watching tips

On their way north, after rounding Point Reyes, the mothers and calves often turn in to the sheltered waters of Bodega Bay.

“They stop in the quieter water near the jetty to rest and nurse,” before continuing out around the rocky cliffs, Jellison said. When they do, visitors on the blufftop trails of Bodega Head who happen to be there can look down and watch them slowly make their way, just outside the surf line.

Recent counts collated by NOAA, the federal oceanic agency, estimated the total population of gray whales to be about 20,000 in 2020, about 6,000 less than 2016.

Most of the population completes the north-south round-trip migration every year. Swimming south, they take advantage of currents offshore, but returning north, they ride the Davidson current, which runs much nearer to land.

And that’s a great help to whale watchers on shore, said Michelle Levesque, the interpretive programs coordinator with California State Parks, Sonoma-Mendocino Coast District. The best spots to watch are points that extend farther out in the sea. (See the list of great spots below.)

What are her tips for finding whales?

“When the whales are southbound, they swim farther out to sea. Look for the subtle change in sea color toward the horizon,” Levesque advised. “Deeper water is darker, and the ocean color is darker where it drops off steeply at the edge of the continental shelf. The gray whales swim just shore-ward of the color shift; that’s a good place to watch for them.”

The best way to find the whales is to look for the spout when they surface to breathe.

“Gray whales have two holes to breathe on the top of their head, so the blow spray comes out heart-shaped,” she said. Gray whales don’t have fins on their backs, just bumps along their spines, called knuckles.

“Grays also stay much closer to shore than other whales, especially when they’re heading north, from February to about May, when they’re even nearer and easier to spot,” Levesque said.

What about spotting scopes or binoculars?

Some viewers have luck with them, but “Binoculars aren’t much help for most people,” Jellison said, because they don’t have a wide enough field of view. She suggested watching as wide an area as you can and looking for the misty blow. They’re visible with the naked eye. Then, keep watching near that spot. Patience pays off.

Adult whales have a fairly predictable breathing pattern. Each whale species has its own distinct blow. The gray’s spout is up to 15 feet high, and on a calm day it can be seen for up to five seconds before it fades. The whales submerge and swim underwater for three to six minutes at a time, then surface to make three to five blows in a row, 30 to 50 seconds apart, before diving deep for three to six minutes again.

They keep swimming the whole time, so look ahead of their path. In winter, they will be moving to your left (south) and in spring will be heading right (north). Calm days are best for watching, because wind scatters the blow quickly and white caps can make it hard to tell the waves from the whales.

Jellison and Levesque hope more people will take the time to come to the shore and experience the whale’s exceptional commute and marvel at our wild neighbors.

They’re a tangible reminder, Levesque said, of how small the planet is and the connections between distant habitats and the effect humans have. While we may not be commuting with kids as much as before, it’s worth stopping to appreciate what it must be like to shepherd a swimming youngster from Mexico to the Arctic.

Stephen Nett is a Bodega Bay-based Certified California Naturalist, writer and speaker, with local nature stories at www.findingcalifornia.com. Contact him at snett@findingcalifornia.com