Sight-Seaing : Whale-Watching Season Opens With Attractions--and Reactions

Two kinds of people go whale watching: those who get seasick and those who do not.

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Both groups were well-represented among the 66 customers who motored out of Newport Harbor early Monday as whale-watching season got off to its traditional start on the day after Christmas.

Fifteen minutes later, in towering seas that deckhand Chris Aschoff dismissed as “medium,” many passengers were leaning over the rail--the victims, chin-first; the immune, to point video cameras at a herd of dolphins racing alongside.

With powerful, quick strokes of their tail fins, the gray-brown creatures surfed the wake of the bow to keep ahead of the boat, moving about 10 m.p.h., then diving away, their backs fading into the green water.

“I guess I’m used to it already,” said Cody Kirkhart, 14, a self-described landlubber from Redding, watching from the starboard side.

Kirkhart’s last time on open water was a fishing trip several years ago, he said, but the motion didn’t bother him or his brother Brett, 17, as they took in the dolphins leaping along the surface of the water in pairs.

“Staring at the shore helps,” the younger Kirkhart offered, his voice eerily calm against the breeze and the chop.

The less hearty passengers remained seated amidships, eyes rolling and jaws tight, within a few steps of the stern as the 77-foot vessel plunged, rolled and yawed through a four-foot swell off Huntington Beach.

“The last boat ride I was on was in Florida, and I was pretty much out of it the whole trip,” said a palish Sandra Pond, of Wichita, Kan., visiting relatives in Westminster for the holidays. “I don’t know that this is much better.”

The Western Pride is one of several vessels operated by Davey’s Locker in Newport Beach.

Davey’s Locker isn’t able to make exact viewing appointments with the California gray whales, whose wintertime migration to warmer waters off Baja California takes them along the California coastline and the western sides of Santa Catalina and San Clemente islands.

Instead, Captain Jeff Patrick wandered a northbound course along the coast, trading sighting gossip and rumor with fishing boats by radio and looking for the telltale splashes of the dolphins against the waves.

The random approach often pays off. Aschoff, 25, recalled seeing a pack of killer whales attacking a minke whale several years ago, close to shore, as the most thrilling sight he’s seen in eight years of crewing.

But other outings, like Monday’s, are reminders that nature discourages the routine. Aside from the dolphin herd there were no cetaceans to be seen, so Patrick finished the cruise by swinging past a light buoy where a cluster of sea lions lolled, like so many other Southland residents recovering from a holiday binge, the bull hogging the sunny side.

Keeping tabs on whales, sea lions, dolphins and other marine mammals has become a serious hobby for Mission Viejo lab technician David Beeninga, a volunteer who narrated Monday’s ride from the wheelhouse and helped Patrick and Aschoff plot a course.

A member of the American Cetacean Society, Beeninga comes along on most of the Western Pride’s weekend trips and occasionally ventures much farther out on trips from Santa Barbara during the off-season.

Beeninga said he hopes this year’s sightings will be as numerous as last season’s as the gray whales move closer to the shore during their trip south and during their return to Alaskan waters.