Please Don’t Touch the Whales : Marine life: Coast Guard agents are boarding boats under cover to check out increasing reports of harassment and injury of the migrating leviathans.

Passengers aboard the boat Fury got a close view Wednesday of two migrating whales, not an unusual occurrence at this time of year. Unusual, however, was the possible presence of an undercover agent of the Coast Guard.

This year, for the first time, law enforcement officers posing as passengers are boarding whale-watching boats to document incidents of whale harassment by boaters and jet water-skiers.

“We’ve never done this before,” Coast Guard spokeswoman Brandy Ian said of the agency’s decision last week to begin randomly placing plainclothes officers aboard commercial whale-watching boats from Dana Point to San Pedro.

The action came in response to a request by the National Marine Fisheries Service after a significant increase in reports of whale harassment over the past several weeks.

“There are people out there who seem to think that their purpose in life is to get as close as possible to a whale,” Ian said. “More and more people want to communicate with them; there have been reports of people actually jumping off their boats and trying to ride a whale.”

Harassing a whale or other marine mammal is a crime punishable by a $20,000 fine and up to a year in jail. By placing officers aboard boats, Ian said, the Coast Guard hopes to observe and document violations for later prosecution by the enforcement division of the National Marine Fisheries Service.

Biologists have long worried about the increasing numbers of people who take to the seas between January and May to watch the annual 12,000-mile migration of gray whales from their breeding grounds along Mexico’s Baja coast to their summer feeding grounds in the Arctic. Some experts have even theorized that the migration patterns of the animals have gradually shifted farther out to sea because of the proliferation of whale-watching cruises.

Concern turned to alarm earlier this month when the National Marine Fisheries Service reported that harassment had increased dramatically--from an average of one incident a month to more than nine in just the last 3 1/2 weeks.

“That’s kind of scary,” said Guy Hollstein, the service’s special agent in charge of enforcement for most of Southern California. “We don’t know whether the number of incidents has actually increased or whether people are just reporting them to us.”

The violations, mostly involving private boats and motorized water skis, have ranged from coming too close to the migrating whales (defined as closer than 100 yards) and crossing their paths, to some cases in which whales have actually been scraped by boats.

“I’ve seen situations (in previous years) where boats have run over whales, chopped up their backs and disabled or mortally wounded them,” said Dennis Kelly, a marine biologist at Orange Coast College.

Besides the obvious injury caused by such collisions, Kelly said, the harassment of whales can disorient them, causing them to expend more energy and become too exhausted to complete their migration. It also can separate mother whales from their calves, resulting in the almost certain deaths of the babies.

Since the undercover program began last weekend, no one has been cited, Hollstein said.

Captain Pat Backus of the Fury said: “On a weekend, you can get as many as 75 boats out here. It’s a big problem; they drive right over the top of them.”

On Wednesday, as the Fury vied with three other commercial whale-watching vessels and three private boats for the best views of the two gray whales, Backus said he had not been informed of the presence of any Coast Guard officers on this particular cruise and would not expect to be.

“I have no problem with that,” Backus said.

Most of his passengers seemed to agree.

“This is their environment, not ours,” said Mark Tague, 40, a financial executive from Trabuco Canyon. “We have to conduct ourselves accordingly, as good guests.”