She whale watches, and watches and watches

A plume of mist appears amid the whitecaps, on a day the wind rages over the Pacific, keeping the boats at bay and providing unfettered passage for whales.

Joan Venette, bundled and sitting in a chair atop the Palos Verdes Peninsula, is the first to make the sighting. “Whale at 217 degrees and 50 mils,” she announces, peering through binoculars trained about half a mile offshore.

Next to Venette, Libby Helms, another volunteer spotter, jots down the position and picks up her binoculars to verify the sighting. It’s 8:32 a.m., more than an hour after the day’s first sighting and not long before the next. The migration of whales heading south to Baja California’s lagoons is picking up by the week.

This is good news for the two dozen or so members of the American Cetacean Society’s Gray Whale Census and Behavior Project, which has been in progress for 23 years at various sites on the Palos Verdes Peninsula. But it’s particularly heartening for Venette, the project’s most tenured volunteer and among the most dedicated whale watchers on the planet.

“I wait all summer long for this,” she says from her perch, taking mental note of her surroundings. A lonely freighter steams to the west. Gulls fly erratically just above the surface, braving the wind in their search for baitfish. A red-tailed hawk soars overhead.

“I don’t miss many days,” Venette says. “There are some years that I haven’t missed any. But then if you get a cold, you don’t want to be here passing it on to the others.”

Venette, 72, recently spent her 2,000th day on the bluff as part of a project directed by Alisa Schulman-Janiger of the ACS’ Los Angeles chapter. The goal: Learn more about the movements and habits of the mammals that feed in or pass through the San Pedro Channel.

“She’s like a mother hen,” Schulman-Janiger says of Venette. “She’s concerned about everyone. Not just the animals.”

A retired nurse who took up whale watching with her husband and family well before the project began, she has since devoted nearly 13,000 hours to observation and taking note -- simple acts that have made her more than an expert in the eyes of her peers.

“Just listening to the stories about all the marine critters Joan has observed over the years has taught me more about how dolphins and whales behave in the wild than all the lectures and books I’ve attended or read in the 15 years I’ve been up there observing marine mammals with her,” says Hugh Ryono, 46, a volunteer from Fullerton. “Her mind is a priceless treasure chest of field knowledge.”

And as sharp as the contrast between land and deep-blue sea on a day when Santa Catalina Island can be seen in detail. She’s asked about some of her fondest recollections. Christmas morning in 1985 comes to mind -- more than a dozen gray whales, arriving after a long lull, frolicked just beyond the coast for more than three hours. She remembers a March day several years ago when volunteers counted 151 whales on their northbound journey back to the Bering and Beaufort seas.

A lot of people don’t realize it, Venette says, but the channel is not a thoroughfare only for migrating gray whales. She has seen killer whales, humpback whales, sperm whales, minke whales, fin whales and even blue whales. Common dolphins, which sometimes number in the thousands, are frequent performers.

Once the water churned in three large areas where three groups of dolphins fed. In the distance were two humpback whales. The whales disappeared for a minute or so, then reappeared amid the dolphins and amid their own bubbles, which they had blown to circle and trap the baitfish. “All of a sudden, right in the middle of the dolphins come these two whales with their mouths open,” Venette recalls. “You could see the water pouring out of their mouths.”

She once watched a submarine surface with bottlenose dolphins riding its bow wave, and another sub with much larger escorts: humpback whales, one on each side. Humpbacks are among the most active of whales. Venette and other volunteers once watched in awe as two of them breached simultaneously 18 consecutive times.

“It’s the things that you’re not expecting to see that makes this really fun,” she says, adding that she leaves her husband at home and drives from her Torrance home rain or shine, and that the previous day the storm that preceded the big wind had filled her boots with rain and she went home soggy and shivering.

Asked if there is one day that stands out above all others, she pauses and shakes her head, saying that each day is as rewarding as the next. “You’re doing something you love, and you’re doing it with people who have the same common interest,” she explains. “It’s the camaraderie of the group and not knowing when or where the next whale’s going to show up.”

She does confess, however, to having a particularly soft spot for the mother gray whales and their calves. “They’re my favorite part of the whole migration,” she says.

Calves born on the southbound journey often ride for extended periods on either the pectoral fins or tail fins (flukes) of their mothers. On the trip home, having fattened up on mother’s milk in the tranquil Baja lagoons, the calves are larger and more independent -- but still highly dependent on their mothers.

Venette recalls the time she saw one calf repeatedly approach the Voyager, a whale-watching boat out of Redondo Sportfishing. Each time its mother chased down her offspring and turned it around. Venette theorizes that the calf had been conditioned to humans during its time in San Ignacio Lagoon, where tourists often travel alongside and even reach out and touch the whales that winter there.

She and others on the morning watch once looked on with wonder as a young whale entered one of the coves beneath the peninsula cliffs, while the mother watched patiently from deeper water. Suddenly and with purpose, the mother slapped her fluke on the water three times. “And the baby just charged to the mother,” Venette says. “It was almost like, ‘That’s it, kiddo. Get over here!’ ”

Nothing so dramatic has happened on this glorious, albeit bone-chilling, morning. But all eyes remain on the water, just in case.

Prospective volunteers can contact Schulman-Janiger via e-mail at janiger@bcf.usc.edu.

To e-mail Pete Thomas or read his previous Fair Game columns, go to latimes.com/petethomas.