Right Rare Sight : Catalina Ferry Encounters Seldom Seen Whale

When the spout of mist first appeared on the horizon off Santa Catalina Island, the dozens of children enjoying their ride on a ferry thought they were going to get to see a California gray whale.

What they actually came across was the sight of a lifetime.

A giant right whale, rarest of the great whales of the North Pacific, let them get within 100 yards as it lazily slapped its tail flukes against the water and blew spouts, “putting on quite a show,” said Maury Jessner of Huntington Beach, a class chaperon for Mesa View Elementary School.

“It was fantastic,” said Karen LeFever, vice principal of Glendale’s R. D. White Elementary school, whose sixth-grade students also were aboard the Catalina Empress.

Videotapes taken by Jessner and LeFever may be the only known footage of a Pacific right whale, marine biologists said, and among only a handful of photographs taken of the species off California. Sightings of the whale off California are rare enough to be known among scientists as the “Santa Barbara sighting” or the “La Jolla sighting.”

Estimates vary, but researchers agree that there are fewer than 200 of the whales in the North Pacific, and possibly as few as 100, according to a report being prepared for the International Whaling Commission. Worldwide, the population is lower than 5,000, fewer than even the blue whale, the best-known symbol of the endangered great whales.

The May 9 sighting roughly eight miles off Catalina has naturalists throughout California clamoring for the tapes.

“We’re dying to see them,” said John Heyning, curator of marine mammals at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History. “I talked to a couple of people who were out on the boat and they were describing a right whale to a T--a large, dark whale, heavily built, with what we call callosities, or a growth on the head, a highly arched mouth, no dorsal fin.

“I have never seen a living right whale,” Heyning said. “I would have loved to have been there.”

There had only been 10 sightings off the coast of California since 1900. Last week’s is the 11th, said Alisa Schulman, who coordinates the American Cetacean Society’s annual whale census off the Palos Verdes Peninsula.

“It is a very important event” to have the whale on videotape, said Schulman as she viewed Jessner’s tape over and over Thursday, exclaiming with excitement at seeing the whale’s white belly, the V-shaped spout, and its distinctive jaw line. The film will make that particular whale easy to identify in the future because of the pattern of its callosities.

Schulman said she listened, frustrated, on the day of the sighting as the captain described on a radio what he was seeing.

“I was out on another boat . . . and I was dying,” she said. “I would have given anything to be on that boat.”

Those who were said they at first did not appreciate the significance of what they were seeing.

The boatload of children on their way to a three-day education camp at the Catalina Island Marine Institute knew only that their lessons had started a little early.

“He was just out there by himself having a good old time,” Jessner said. “I didn’t really realize it was an unusual whale.”

A few minutes after the whale went into a deep dive and left the area, the ship’s captain had Jessner play back his video on a television set on the bridge while he flipped through a whale identification book.

The video showed a distinctive two-pronged spout, unique to the right whale, and a sharply arched mouth.

“The captain was really interested in whales and pretty educated about them,” Jessner said. “He told us how rare it was.”

“We stopped the boat and I put my binoculars on it to identify it,” said the skipper, Mike Crawford. For the next 10 minutes or so, Crawford said, those on board saw the whale “moving its tail up and down . . . slapping the water . . . just lolling there on the water.” Crawford estimated that the whale was 55 to 58 feet in length.

Although there are several hundred right whales in the North Atlantic and a similar number in the Southern Hemisphere, the whales are rare in the North Pacific. The International Whaling Commission banned right whale hunting in 1937, but Japanese and Canadian whaling of the species continued in the North Pacific until the late 1950s, according to marine researchers.

Whalers hunted the species to near-extinction in the 1800s, calling it the “right” whale to kill because of its girth, its surface feeding, and its tendency to float when dead. The slow-moving giants were also easy targets because they swam near coastlines. Robust right whales contain many of the natural oils prized by whalers, and their sturdy yet flexible baleen, or whalebone, was used much as plastics are today.

While other whale populations have rebounded with preservation efforts, the right whale’s numbers, particularly in the North Pacific, remain small.

“We know on the East Coast there have been problems with the whales being hit by ships,” Heyning said. “But I suspect along our coast that the population remains low because they were hunted to such low numbers.