whale watching in sacramento

[TWAK]

my camera sucks, and the reaction time is slow, so only 2 pics of the whale out of 15 or so that I took of the whales came out.










and the best shot I got, DOH

[KevinFromTexas]

Pretty cool. I've never seen a whale before. I've seen dolphins and sharks, even a sea turtle, but never a whale.

[BTinSF]

^^^Well, you still haven't seen a healthy whale. Unfortunately, these two are apparently sick and/or injured and I doubt they are going to survive.

[Chicago103]

How do whales make it all the way up river to Sacramento?

[BTinSF]

^^^They swim. Large ships can do it--the river is navigable. Why not whales? But experts have said they only enter fresh water when they are sick or lost (and for a whale, being lost may mean they are sick).

[Derek]

That's sad.

[BTinSF]

Wayward whales make a splash in California
By MICHELLE LOCKE, The Associated Press
2007-05-19 01:21:32.0
Current rank: # 35 of 6,571

WEST SACRAMENTO, Calif. -
The tale of two whales stranded in the California delta has captured hearts and headlines in Northern California as efforts continued Friday to lure the injured mammals back to their salty home 90 miles west.

Along the dusty banks of the Port of Sacramento, hundreds kept tabs on the cetacean invasion while for the second day marine scientists aboard small boats played recorded sounds that included other humpback whales feeding.

But the wayward pair, a mother and her calf, showed no signs of cutting short their trip to the capital, and scientists said they won't try to rush them, for now.

"We really do not want to stress the mother and her calf in any way," said Frances Gulland of the Sausalito-based Marine Mammal Center, which is helping in the rescue operation.

If the underwater siren songs still don't work, rescue coordinators planned to leave the whales alone this weekend to see if some downtime helps.

"We have been trying to do the most passive, least invasive tactics first," said Carrie Wilson, a biologist with the California Department of Fish and Game.

Photographs showed the two were wounded during their travels, probably by a ship's propeller, making it especially important to treat them with care, Gulland said.

Heavy weekend boat traffic in the delta is another reason to leave the whales alone for a few days, according to the U.S. Coast Guard.

"The port is the safest place for them to be," said Ed Sweeney, a spokesman for the Coast Guard Auxiliary. "It's a safety issue for both the whales and the public."

The Coast Guard will enforce a 500 yard safety zone around the whales, and the north Port of Sacramento channel and boat ramp will remain closed to the public through the weekend.

Attempts to lure the whales back to the ocean with the recorded sounds are scheduled to resume Monday, when boat traffic eases, he said.

The whales briefly seemed to get the right idea by themselves on Friday morning, when they headed 200 yards into the deep water channel leading to the Sacramento River, which eventually empties into San Francisco Bay. But then they turned around.

If there's no progress by Tuesday, rescuers plan to start a herding operation, which would require at least 50 boats and include tactics such as banging pipes under water, a sound whales don't like.

"We hope that the next few days will show some progress but ... we really are in uncharted ground," Gulland said.

On Friday, onlookers oohed and aahed - and clicked their cell phone cameras - as the whales occasionally broke the surface in a sibilant whoosh, their smooth gray bodies rippling through the placid waters.

The scene was reminiscent of the publicity that attended Humphrey, a humpback whale that wandered into the delta - although not as far inland as the mother-calf duo - by way of San Francisco Bay more than 20 years ago. In Humphrey's case, the whale was in freshwater for 26 days and suffered no ill effects.

Based on that experience, scientists are not overly concerned that the newly stranded whales are in immediate danger even though they have nothing to feed on, Wilson said.

"Maybe it's not salt water, it's not ideal, it's not where they want to be, but they are safe," she said.

Biology professor Douglas Long's not at all surprised by the hubbub over the whales.

"What I think is people look at marine mammals as sort of being the human counterpart in the ocean - they're warm-blooded; they're intelligent; they're social, all the qualities we like to think of as having," said Long, who teaches at St. Mary's College in the east San Francisco Bay suburb of Moraga.

Scientifically, whales are important indicators of ocean health, Gulland said. "They are sentinels of change," she said.

The Humphrey saga spun out over years, starting with a more than three-week-long effort in 1985 to nudge the 40-foot humpback back out to sea. Humphrey was a slippery fellow, though, swimming several times toward the Golden Gate only to elude watchers and head back east.

Even after he finally made it back to the Pacific Ocean, Humphrey was spotted near the Farallon Islands off San Francisco during the next two years and in 1990 he wandered back into San Francisco Bay, spending three days there - including one day stuck on mud flats - before swimming back out to sea forever.

In 1988, whales were big news again with world attention focused on three gray whales trapped under the ice off the coast of Alaska. One of the whales died, but the other two appeared to swim free after a huge rescue effort that included assistance from a Cold War foe, with two Soviet icebreakers helping clear a path to open water.

The Sacramento whales probably were on their annual trip up the California coast to cooler waters up north when they got lost. Their situation is complicated by the mother-child relationship since the mother probably is focused on the welfare of the calf, believed to be suckling, Gulland said.

The whales have inspired a naming contest in local newspapers and television stations. On Friday, Lt. Gov. John Garamendi, who has been helping coordinate news conferences at the port, announced that two names had stuck: Delta for the mother (because the whales are in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta) and Dawn for her calf - which Garamendi said referred to "a new day, a new hope, a new opportunity."

Jeanetta Deutsch, who was visiting Sacramento from Great Bend, Kan., was among those thrilling to the sight of the breaching whales Friday.

"They're just awesome. They're majestic," she said.

A few yards away, Ruben Guerrero, who lives in the Sacramento area, held up a sign reading "George Costanza We Need You," a reference to a "Seinfeld" episode in which the hapless George saves a beached whale.

Guerrero, of Sacramento, said he'd always wanted to go whale-watching on the ocean and "here they come to me."

Rescuing the whales could prove expensive, but Guerrero, for one, didn't have a problem with that.

"That's what the beauty of this country is, we care about things like that," he said.

Source: http://ewww.sfexaminer.com/printa-73...alifornia.html

[BTinSF]

Whales head back out toward the Pacific
But humpback mother and calf have dozens of miles yet to go

John Wildermuth, Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, May 20, 2007

(05-20) 19:00 PDT West Sacramento (Yolo County) -- The Delta's two biggest current attractions got on the move this afternoon when a 50-foot-long humpback whale and her calf headed south toward Rio Vista and -- state and local officials and throngs of casual observers hoped -- back to their Pacific Ocean home.

By 6:20 p.m. the whales had traveled 13 miles, almost half-way from the port to Rio Vista, where they would re-enter the Sacramento River Delta with another 60 miles to go before they reached the open ocean.

"We don't know why they came up to Sacramento, and we don't know why they're going, but we're happy to see them on their way,'' said Bernadette Fees, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Fish and Game.

Actually, Brian Gorman, a fisheries expert for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, does have an idea of what spurred the pair to head south from the basin at the Port of Sacramento, where they have spent the past few days.

"Around 2 o'clock, two tugs berthed here went down to help a bulk carrier with a load of fertilizer that was about a mile down the shipping channel,'' Gorman said. "As soon as the engines fired up, the whales skedaddled.''

The powerful, low-frequency thrum of the tugboat engines may have startled the whales, although neither mother nor calf had seemed particularly bothered by noisy and varied efforts marine biologists and others had used to convince the pair to head back home last week. The experts had planned to let the whales rest another couple days before trying to herd them south with a flotilla on Tuesday.

Even after the whales hit the 200-foot-wide channel Sunday, there were some minutes of concern. With the 95-foot-wide Sanko Jupiter sharing the shipping channel, there wasn't much room to sneak by, Gorman said.

As marine biologists and officials with the state and the U.S. Coast Guard watched from following boats, the mother eased by the ship about 3:30 p.m. The calf started to follow but balked and headed back toward West Sacramento, Gorman said. But it soon circled back again and squeezed by the Sanko Jupiter to join his mother.

The Coast Guard and other agencies are assembling boats at Rio Vista to block off some of the Delta's many sloughs and keep the whales headed toward the Bay, Fees said. But the whales would have no difficulty diving under the boats and going wherever they want to.

Earlier Sunday, there was no indication the whales intended to end their Sacramento holiday. At 1:30 p.m., they seemed to be playing tag with a 25-foot-long Coast Guard safety boat, surfacing in front of it and then moving behind it.

"There were very playful today,'' Fees said.

Oblivious to the oohs and ahs of the crowds lining the bank, the humpbacks playing hooky from their ocean home spent the early part of Sunday on a lazy cruise around the waters of the port.



E-mail John Wildermuth at jwildermuth@sfchronicle.com.

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