Mammals Make a Whale of a Surprise Return

They’re back . . .

When it seemed the whale-watching season was over, along come the biggest whales of them all.

Blue whales, and the smaller but equally unusual humpback whales, have taken up temporary residence in the Santa Barbara Channel.

“There were so many on Sunday that people were stopping along (U.S. 101) to get a look,” said Capt. Fred Benko of the Condor, an 88-foot vessel out of Sea Landing in Santa Barbara.

The concentration of blues and humpbacks is believed to be the largest in the area since 1992, when up to 200 blues and even more humpbacks stuck around for most of the summer, feeding on krill, planktonic crustaceans that have ridden the currents into the channel.

Benko said the majestic mammals spent hours around his boat Sunday, and the dive boat Truth reported hundreds playing off San Miguel Island.

Whale experts say the appearance is unusual, but not rare, citing similar phenomena off Monterey in 1986 and the Farallon Islands in 1990. Still, they are stirring up some late-season whale-watching.

Benko has changed some of his fishing trips to whale-watch/fishing combinations and has scheduled some days solely for the whales.

CISCO Sportfishing in Oxnard is sending an airplane out today to see if the whales are close enough to make the trips worthwhile.

“We’ll make a decision by Friday,” said Russ Harmon, owner of the landing.

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For Southlanders, the sight of gray whales as they migrate down the coast each winter, then back up in the spring is nothing new.

But it is believed there are only about 5,000 blues left in the world and they are, as Benko points out, the largest creatures ever to inhabit the Earth.

They reach lengths of 100 feet and weights of more than 100 tons.

Benko might also throw in a few little-known facts: That the tongue of one blue whale weighs more than a 5 1/2-ton African elephant, that its heart is larger than a Volkswagen. On a trip in 1992, he pointed to a spouting whale and told his passengers, “That air you see coming out of the blowhole? It comes out about 300 m.p.h.”

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Albacore anyone? Rumor has it that the Millie G, a commercial jig boat from Morro Bay, picked up 15 albacore Saturday 30 miles from the landing. Trouble is, nobody has been able to reach the boat’s owner to verify the rumor.

Until it is confirmed, a spokeswoman for Virg’s Landing in Morro Bay said, its sportfishing boats will remain close to home.

Until any tuna show either off Central California or San Diego, the best bet locally for big game fishermen will be anywhere there are squid. The rubbery crustaceans, a favorite food of white sea bass, are reportedly abundant at the northern Channel Islands. The CISCO Sportfishing fleet found them on Monday, and bagged 43 seabass.