Dana Wharf Blog

There is a morning every December when someone on the bow yells before the captain does. It is usually a first-timer, they are usually pointing at the wrong patch of water, and about four seconds later a heart-shaped blow goes up right where they were looking. That is a gray whale, and that is December…

Ask anyone at the wharf which month gets slept on, and November comes up fast. The summer crowds have thinned out, the blue whales that made July and August so loud have mostly headed south, and a lot of people just assume the good whale watching is done until the new year. It is not….

Every summer, somewhere between the second dolphin stampede and the third round of “did you SEE that,” a guest leans over the rail and asks me the same question: “Can we get in the water with them?” It is a fair thing to wonder. When a pod of common dolphins is riding your bow wave,…

People ask us this one on the boat all the time. They are planning a California trip, they know they want to see whales, and they have narrowed it down to two spots on the map: Santa Barbara up north, and Dana Point down here in south Orange County. Both are real whale country. Both…

Ask anyone who works the docks here and they will tell you the same thing: October is one of the best-kept secrets in Dana Point. The summer crowds have thinned out, the kids are back in school, and the ocean does this thing in fall where it goes flat and glassy for days at a…

It is the first question we hear at the ticket counter, usually before someone even asks what is biting: “How much does it cost to go out?” Fair question. You are about to spend a chunk of your day on the water, and you want to know what you are getting into before you hand…

Spend enough mornings on the water off Dana Point and you start to get a feel for how a whale moves. Most of the time it is unhurried. A fin whale will surface, blow a tall column of mist, roll that long gray back through the swell, and slip under again, all at a pace…

Ask most people when to go whale watching in Dana Point and they will say winter for the gray whales or July for the blue whales. Almost nobody says September. That is exactly why we love it. By the time the calendar flips past Labor Day, the summer crowds thin out, the morning marine layer…

There is a sound you learn to love on the back of a Dana Wharf boat in the summer. It is the drag screaming on a half-dozen reels at once, followed by the captain calling out “hookup, hookup” over the rail. Nine times out of ten in July, that chaos is a school of barracuda that just crashed our jigs. They are long, mean, and full of teeth, and pound for pound they will test your reflexes more than almost anything else we catch close to home. California barracuda are one of the most underrated targets in our whole sportfishing lineup. They are aggressive, they school up thick, and they hit a surface jig like they are mad at it. They are also the perfect fish to learn on, because the technique that catches them is the same technique that…

Ask anyone who runs the offshore boats out of Dana Point what they look forward to all year, and you will hear the same answer: bluefin. Pacific bluefin tuna are the hardest-pulling, most stubborn, most addicting fish that swim off our coast. They show up in late spring, stack up through summer, and turn ordinary…

Ask anyone who works the docks down here and they will tell you the same thing: if you only get to go whale watching once all year, make it August. By the time August rolls around, the water off Dana Point has warmed up, the krill has stacked up, and the biggest animals on the…

One of the questions guests ask most often once a blue whale is alongside the boat is some version of: where does this thing go when summer ends? The whale we’re looking at off Dana Point right now does not stay here. Blue whales move. The ones that show up in the Southern California Bight…