April 16, 2009 Thursday

Stinson Beach	Straight out from the restrooms
10:00 am to 10:30 am	1' to 2'
Low tide (0.6 ft)	Stiff onshore breeze
Bright and sunny with a cold breeze	Didn't go out

I was finishing my jog on the beach at Stinson when I noticed five people standing by the water’s edge staring out to sea. Something’s happening I thought to myself. I joined them. Not more than fifty yards offshore a pod of whales was cruising by. The above picture shows two of them. Note the white water of a breaking wave at the bottom of the frame that gives you an idea of how close they were to shore. It was difficult to tell the number of them, more than two but less than ten. They were circling, not just passing by. They would surface, submerge and re-surface heading in the opposite direction. A whale can stay under water for a long time and travel considerable distance before coming up for air, thus following them was difficult, which also why I couldn’t tell how many of them there were. In all my years of going to the beach this is the first time I have seen whales so close to shore. It’s common this time of year to see a pod of them far at sea traveling in one direction.

“What am I doing standing here,” I said to myself. “Get the camera dummy.” I ran up to my car, grabbed my camera, which already had the 300 mm lens attached, and ran back. The whales were still circling and the crowd on the beach had more than doubled. In a twenty-minute period I took over thirty shots. Using the “sports” feature of the camera, which clicks off five frames a second, I fired away every time I caught a glance of one of them. Nature’s animals don’t always cooperate for the photographer. I would hold the camera at the ready, scan the water and wait for one of them to surface. When I saw one, I would point the camera toward it and try to find them in the viewfinder, which is not automatic. By the time I focused on one and clicked off some shots the beast had submerged, leaving me with plenty of shots of choppy water. I did manage to get three decent shots. When I left, the whales were still circling and I have no idea why.

Earlier, when checking out the surf at Bolinas I ran into Captain Kip, one of the captains of the pilot boats that guide the big ships into San Francisco Bay. We watched tiny ripples coming in at the Groin and the strong out flowing current that was knocking down the waves at the Channel. Captain Kip was looking forward to surfing today, but it just wasn’t going to happen. I ask him if the recession had affected the boat traffic. I was expecting to hear that it had significantly dropped. Not so he assured me, a little maybe, but not much. San Francisco – Oakland is a major port, the third largest in the United States behind New York and Los Angeles with wide variety of traffic: oil tankers for the refineries, grain carriers, bulk carriers for rock and gravel, car carriers and hundreds of container ships. Traffic was down a little, but for the pilots, they were always busy. The next day Kip was traveling to a pilot’s conference in Vancouver. A Canadian pilot friend and surfer had invited Kip to surf one of the islands up there. The friend was going to provide everything: boards, wetsuits, transportation and knowledge of the local breaks. Kip was looking forward to this adventure.