Dana Wharf Blog

If you’ve ever held a shark jaw at a tackle shop or seen one mounted on a wall, you’d swear it was bone. It feels like bone. It looks like bone. But it’s not. Sharks don’t have a single bone in their body. Not one. Instead, their entire skeleton is made of cartilage, the same…

If you’ve been on a Dana Wharf whale watching trip, you’ve seen dolphins. Thousands of them. Megapods of common dolphins stretching across a mile of ocean. Bottlenose dolphins cruising past the harbor mouth. Pacific white-sided dolphins launching out of the water in the wake of the Dana Pride. But have you ever seen a porpoise?…

If you spend enough time on the water off Dana Point, you’ll eventually see a shark. Maybe it’s a mako launching out of the water near San Clemente Island, or a blue shark cruising past the boat on a pelagic trip. It might even be a great white spotted from the air just offshore. One…

If you’ve been out on a Dana Wharf whale watching trip, you’ve almost certainly seen California sea lions. They’re the loud, barking, scene-stealing animals piled on our harbor jetty, sprawled across navigational buoys, and sometimes popping up right alongside the boat to see what we’re doing. But every once in a while, a guest will…

Introduction People ask us this constantly: “When’s the best time to see whales at Dana Point?” And our honest answer is — there isn’t really a bad time. Dana Point is called the Whale Watching Capital of the World for a reason. We have whale activity here essentially 365 days a year. That said, different…

I’ve had this conversation on the boat more times than I can count. Someone watches a humpback whale disappear beneath the surface and asks, “How long until it comes back up?” And then: “How deep did it just go?” The answers vary wildly depending on the species. Some whales are basically surface feeders. Others are…

Every summer when we’re running our offshore whale watching trips out of Dana Point, somebody on the boat has a moment. A blue whale surfaces close — maybe 50 feet away — and there’s this collective silence. It happens every time. Then someone asks, almost in a whisper, “Are they endangered?” It’s a completely understandable…

Sharks get a bad reputation, and a lot of that comes from the fact that most people’s understanding of what they eat starts and ends with “everything.” But the reality is a lot more interesting — and more specific — than that. Having spent years on the water off the Southern California coast, I’ve seen…

“Pelagic” is one of those words that feels more complicated than it is. It just means “open ocean.” A pelagic bird is a bird that lives its life primarily on or over the open sea — coming to land only to breed, and spending the rest of its existence over water that can be hundreds…

Halibut are one of the most satisfying fish you can target in Southern California. They fight hard, they’re genuinely challenging to catch, and they taste incredible. They’re also one of the most misunderstood fish by beginners, which leads to a lot of days staring at a still rod tip and going home empty-handed. I’ve watched…

Every time we have a pod of dolphins riding the bow wake of our boat — which happens on most of our whale watching tours out of Dana Point — I watch people’s faces change. There’s something about being close to a dolphin that makes you immediately suspect you’re dealing with something more than just…

Introduction I’ve seen every type of person climb aboard one of our boats at Dana Wharf — first-timers in flip-flops, locals who’ve been out here a hundred times, families with kids who are bouncing off the walls with excitement. And every single trip, without fail, someone ends up regretting what they wore. It’s not their…