San Ignacio Lagoon – Gray Whale Trip

February 1999
Each year the Gray Whales migrate from the feeding grounds above Alaska to their breeding and calving grounds in the lagoons on the West Coast of Baja. We once again returned San Ignacio lagoon to watch the whales and hope one would allow us to pet it. We have been to the lagoon 5 times, 3 time with granddaughters. This was our oldest granddaughter Jen’s turn. Our tour operator was Baja Discovery.

Our journey to the lagoon included a bus trip from San Diego to Ensenada, a chartered flight to the village of San Ignacio, a horrible 2 hour van trip over washboard desert road to the lagoon and finally a boat ride to our "island camp" at Rocky Point. The location of the camp is wonderful. The point juts out into the lagoon allowing the whales pass very close to camp; often they just hanging around. At night you can hear the whales as they exhale (blow).
On one of our outings we encountered a mom with a very young calf. The calf was very curious and very cute. It would roll on mom’s back. Sometimes it would roll on its side and mom would come up and lift the calf out of the water. On a few occasions the calf came up with its mouth open; perhaps it was nursing. Just before the calf took a long dive, it would throw its head back as if to get a big gulp of air.
At the end of the encounter, the calf rolled on mom’s back and she carried it close to our boat and the 2 of them dove under our boat. We spent over an hour watching and photographing this wonderful encounter.
Some of the behavior we observed:
A BREACH, when the whale comes most the way out of the water and then makes a huge splash as it returns to the water
A SPY HOP, when the whale comes part way out of the water then slips back under.
As a whale takes a long dive it sometimes raises it tail and shows it's FLUKE. As the whale comes to the surface it exhales. The spray of condensation is called a BLOW. We coined the phrase RAINBLOW for the effect when the sun catches the blow and creates a rainbow.
A "friendly" is a whale that comes up close to the boats, hangs around and lets the people in the boat touch it. We had one friendly encounter, Joyce and Jen were able to briefly touch the whale.

We had a number of times with friendly behavior, but the whales stayed just inches from our outstretched hands.
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