Dana Point

April is the month the gray whales stop being a migration and start being a family. The single adults and juveniles have mostly cleared out by now. What is left coming up the coast are mothers and calves, moving slowly, hugging the sand, in no particular hurry to be anywhere. It is also, quietly, the…

By March the gray whales have turned around. The animals passing Dana Point are no longer running south to Baja with somewhere to be. They are coming back up the coast from the calving lagoons, and they are in far less of a hurry about it. That changes what a trip actually looks like from…

There is one month a year when we can leave Dana Point Harbor in the morning, find a gray whale swimming south toward Mexico, and then find another one a few hours later swimming north toward Alaska. That month is February. Most people book a whale watching trip in January because that is when they…

There is a stretch of ocean off the Dana Point Headlands where, on a good January morning, you can watch a heart-shaped blow go up, then another a half mile past it, then a third off the bow, and realize you have lost count of how many gray whales are in your two hours on…

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….

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…

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…