Dana Wharf Blog

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…

Every weekend from the deck of the Dana Pride, we watch the same thing happen. A kid who was quietly scrolling on a phone in the harbor parking lot spots a spout on the horizon, and five minutes later they are pressed against the rail shouting at their parents to come look. That moment is…

Every week, someone calls the wharf and asks us the same question in a slightly different way. “Will I get seasick?” “Do people throw up?” “My wife gets car sick on a straight highway. Can she handle a whale watching trip?” Fair questions. Nobody wants to spend $50 and three hours hanging over a rail,…

If you search “whale watching Orange County,” you’ll get a dozen results telling you roughly the same thing: there are whales off the coast, and you should go see them. But if you’re actually trying to figure out where to go and what you’ll see, those results don’t help much. We’ve been running whale watching…

You hear them before you see them. That loud, rhythmic barking echoing across Dana Point Harbor is the unmistakable sound of California sea lions, and around here, it’s as constant as the Pacific itself. Walk down to Dana Wharf on any given morning, and you’ll spot them piled on the inner jetty rocks, draped over…

People call us all the time with the same question: “What will we see if we come out this weekend?” The honest answer is that we never know exactly what’s going to show up. The ocean doesn’t take reservations. But after 55 years of running boats out of Dana Point Harbor, we know the patterns….

On a whale watching trip out of Dana Wharf in March 2026, our naturalist Laura Lopez reported something unusual alongside the day’s fin whales and common dolphins: a sea turtle. It doesn’t happen every trip. Sea turtles are not an everyday sighting in Dana Point waters. But when one shows up, whether it’s an olive…

Three. An octopus has three hearts. If that sounds excessive, wait until you hear the rest. Octopuses also have nine brains, blue blood, zero bones, and arms that can taste food. They can change color in a fraction of a second, squeeze through any gap their beak fits through, and solve puzzles that stump some…

Every once in a while on a Dana Wharf trip, we’ll pass through a stretch of water dotted with jellyfish. Moon jellies drifting near the surface, their translucent bells pulsing slowly in the current. Pacific sea nettles trailing long amber tentacles behind them. Purple-striped jellyfish glowing like something from another planet. They’re beautiful. They’re alien….