Whale Watching

If you are visiting Southern California and trying to decide between Los Angeles and Dana Point for a whale watching trip, here is the honest take from people who run these boats for a living. Dana Point is our home harbor, so we know exactly why it works. We’ll lay out the comparison the way…

Summer whale watching out of Dana Point is the easiest version of the trip all year. The water is warm, the swell is small, the blue whales are in town, and the boat ride out of the harbor is short. But it is also the season people show up the most under-prepared. They pack like…

Short answer: yes, if you do it right. Long answer: it depends on what you go in expecting, what time of year you go, and who you go with. We have been running whale watching trips out of Dana Point Harbor since 1971, so this is a question we have heard a lot of versions…

If you only get one shot at whale watching in Southern California this year, do it in July. We say that as people who run these boats every single day, in every season, year-round. July is the month when the biggest animal that has ever lived on Earth shows up a few miles off the…

If you live anywhere in greater Los Angeles, you have two main port options for whale watching: head down toward the Long Beach harbors or drive a little farther south to Dana Point. Both will get you on the water. Both run year-round. But the experience is meaningfully different once the lines come off the…

The question lands in our inbox almost every week, especially from people planning their first trip to Southern California. They’ve Googled around, seen tour options in both regions, and want a straight answer: should they drive to San Diego or Dana Point to go whale watching? The straight answer is Dana Point. After twenty-five years…

By the second week of June, the water off Dana Point starts feeling like a different ocean. The fog burns off earlier, the dolphins stop traveling in tight little pods and start moving in herds you can hear before you can see, and somewhere along the underwater canyons a few miles offshore, the blue whales…

You’re planning a whale watching trip on the Orange County coast, and you’ve narrowed it down to two harbors: Dana Point and Newport Beach. Both put boats in the water. So which one should you choose? Dana Point. After 55 years of running whale watching trips out of Dana Point Harbor (we were the first…

Blue whales are the largest animals that have ever lived. Bigger than any dinosaur. The size of a Boeing 737. A single one of them can weigh as much as a fully loaded semi truck, and the heart that pumps through that body is roughly the size of a small car. For most people, the…

Every year, May does something to the water off Dana Point. The gray whales that we have been watching all winter are heading north toward Alaska, the dolphins are running in pods that look more like rivers, and somewhere off the edge of the continental shelf, the largest animals that have ever lived on this…