There were some Western grebes in the harbor which I watched while I ate a quick lunch.

Interesting lighthouse on the way out of the harbor with a jumble of cylindrical concrete blocks breaking the waves around it.

A common loon in winter plumage on the way out.

I’m not great at gull identification with all of their intermediate sub-adult plumages, but I think this is a Heermann’s gull in 2nd winter (this was also the suggestion of the Merlin app). Probably Albatrossity would know.

We saw this relatively small juvenile humpback whale diving in the kelp forest fairly near to shore.

It kept coming up with kelp caught in its fluke.

Lots of common murres. Unfortunately, I didn’t pack my binoculars, but did bring my Nikon and telephoto lens with me. My philosophy is to take pictures whenever I am unsure and try to confirm some ID later. Almost every picture of some bird I couldn’t readily identify later turned out to be a murre.

Common murres and Brandt’s cormorants.

We went out to the underwater canyon and the captain spotted a pair of gray whales. We followed them at a careful distance as they moved through on their migration to Baja. They were just slowly cruising below the surface, conserving energy for the trip (longest migration of any mammal according to our naturalist!). They would come up for a quick breath every five minutes or so. The other interesting fact that the naturalist related is that because they are bottom feeders, they accumulate the most barnacles of any whale species (sometimes a thousand pounds of barnacles!)

There were also auklets! One Cassin’s auklet and lots of rhinoceros auklets like this one. Unfortunately, they were a bit skittish when close to the boat and it was hard to get a crisp picture when flying. 

Definitely, a lot more to see during the humpback seasons, but it was an interesting change of pace and got to see my first gray whales.