Stanford Stories XXVII - Whale Watching in Monterey

After almost four weeks of silence, it’s finally time for new story from sunny California. The reason for the unusually long silence is simple. During the last three weeks, Hélène visited me here in Stanford. After a bit of time in the Bay Area, we rented a car and went on 10 day “spring-break” road trip through southern California. In the following Stanford Storiess, I’ll write about my favorite moments of the trip.

Our first stop brought us to Monterey - a small picturesque coast town situated at the Monterey Bay. The latter is famous for its rich marine wildlife including sea otters, harbor seals and also whales. Since neither of us had ever seen a whale, it was a pretty obvious choice that we would go a whale watching boat trip. After a night in a rustic Motel, we went down to Fisherman’s Wharf to get on board on one of many little whale watching boats. This morning, we were lucky and got two of the last tickets for the “Star of Monterey” (a boat from “Chris” who operates the oldest whale watching business in town) that took us on a 3h cruise through the bay.

As most of you can imagine, I was not too optimistic that we would actually see whales (I rent tons of disclaimer on websites that said that there is obviously no guarantee to see whales). Fortunately, my pessimism was wrong. After a short time we could spot two humpback whales at some distance between two other boats. Seeing those majestic creatures emerging from the sea, creating water vapor fountains while expelling air from the blowholes was spectacular. It was also impressive to see that both humpbacks seemed not afraid of humans and came within a few meters to our boat allowing us to see barnacles at their tail fin. All in all, a fantastic experience that I can highly recommend.