We Friendly Gray Whales

We gray whales are quite fasinated by you humans. We like to take our babies up to the boats to check out the people. When our babies are real young like Justin here, we keep them close to our side.

Later in the season, the kids just wear us out, so we sometimes just stay off to the side and rest and let junior run off and play with the boats.

Sometimes we make it real easy for you humans to pet us, like Julia is doing for Jana.

Sometimes you have to be quick like when Gary here, just came up and Jen had to reach out quickly before Gary was gone again.

We each have our preference on which boat to choose. Some of us like to make sure we come up to each boat in the area. I particularly like to visit boats with little kids in it; they are so much fun to watch.

Sometimes we will come up along side a boat so a number of people can pet us at the same time.

The boatmen are real cautious; they will drive off and leave us when we lift up the boat and move it all around.

Then there are times when we really make you work to pet us. In this picture, Jack is on his back and rubbing his belly on the bottom of the boat.

Jack is in both of these last two pictures. We usually don't visit boats with a lot of noise, but after the encounter in this picture and the one above, Jack followed the boat because he could hear music and people keeping time to the music, and wanted to join in on the fun.

Gotcha!

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Last Revised: Fri, Sep 6, 2002