Boca de Soledad, Magdalena Bay, Baja California

Whale watching strains one’s command of adjectives. Exciting, exhilarating, awe-inspiring (participants past and present are here invited to fill in their favorite: ______ ); but it is also at times frustrating and always humbling. We have now completed two days of intimate encounters with the gray whales of Magdalena Bay.

Yesterday afternoon we boarded our Zodiacs and set out with high hopes and expectations, and we had to search high and low for any whales at all. How do you hide a forty-ton mother and her two to three-ton calf in the shallow, enclosed waters of the nursery lagoon, let alone the fifteen or so mother-young pairs that we believe to be here?

Our beach-walking contingent later reported seeing numerous spouts out in the Pacific, beyond the mouth of the lagoon. And thus, even after our many years of experience in Magdalena Bay, we see and learn something new about the behavior of these great and mysterious beasts. This morning we headed out early, our hopes still high but our expectations more guarded. For whatever reason and to our immense satisfaction, the whales had returned to the lagoon and we had a marvelous morning of close encounters. Each Zodiac was able to adopt a cow-calf pair. We cruised beside them, carefully paralleling their course at a respectful distance to avoid disturbance. It is up to the whales to initiate closer encounters should they so choose; we cannot force ourselves upon them. Choose they did, and the occupants of each of our Zodiacs experienced the joy of huge mother and small (if two to three-tons can be called small) young milling around and immediately under the boat, the young rolling across the back of its mother, the huge female blowing clouds of exhalation into the air. If the wind was right, the mist reached us as well and we were all touched by a whale as we sought to touch them in return. Sometimes the mist caught the rays of the sun and the light was refracted into the colors of a rainblow. Add privileged to the list of adjectives, this one applied to ourselves.