Whale Wars

For Christmas this year my sister and brother-in-law got Brad and I some tickets to go Whale Watching at nearby Newport Beach. After doing some research we decided that, to increase our odds of actually seeing a whale, we would wait until spring/summer and hopefully get a glimpse of some migrating whales. Well, a couple of weeks ago we finally got to really enjoy our Christmas gift. We headed down to Newport to enjoy a summer afternoon on the ocean. As we got on the boat we were excited to do something a little out of the ordinary. We were on the ship for probably about 30 minutes when the "captain" announced that he "was pretty sure he found some whales for us". Everybody started cramming towards the front of the boat so they could get a better view of the whale. Including us. I was pretty sure that the captain was lying to us, because we looked and looked and saw nothing. Whale less, soaked and freezing we went inside to dry off for a second. When all of the sudden Brad noticed the boat was turning a different direction, so he said let's go outside. We walked out and not even a minute later we saw the whale a little closer. I was thrilled to actually see a whale so close. Then it disappeared for a little while and the captain said, "It came up on the other side! Everybody go to the other side!" (I'm sure he used official terms for the boat, but I was too worried about missing the whale so I wasn't really listening.) We ran to the other side and this is what we saw. (The video's not great because I didn't want to see the whale through the screen and I was on a slippery boat.)

I was really excited then! We actually got to see a Blue Whale! It was absolutely amazing. Blue whales are the largest animal in existence, and we got to see one about 50 yards from us! Thanks Brandon and Akayleia!

The following pictures are mainly for Akayleia. She sent us this cute little whale with the gift card, so we thought we would take it along just in case we didn't get to see a real whale. Here's what we did the whole way back to shore.

We've since watched both season one and two of Whale Wars on Netflix. We're a little bit addicted. Thanks Jandy, for introducing Brad to the show. And thanks again Brandon and Akayleia for such a fun Christmas gift!