Dana Wharf

Every weekend at Dana Point Harbor we watch the same scene play out. A group rolls down the dock at sunrise, coffee in hand, dressed for a beach day. Flip-flops, board shorts, a t-shirt, maybe a hat from a gift shop in Laguna. They are about to spend six to twelve hours offshore where 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…

April 1st is one of the loudest mornings of the year at Dana Wharf. The gates open early, the parking lot fills up, the gear shop is moving like a Black Friday line, and every boat going out is loaded with anglers who have been waiting all winter for the same thing: the rockfish opener….

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…

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,…