Rhapsody in BLUE

WE know why blue whales cross open ocean to visit our coastal waters. We know, more or less, where to find them, and usually when. In fact, we understand quite a few things about these majestic giants.

Knowing about the blue whale, however, is not entirely the same as comprehending it.

You can appreciate, for instance, that these are the largest animals ever to roam our planet -- bigger than the dinosaurs, heavy as locomotives. You can realize that nowhere in the world do so many of them, perhaps up to 2,000, congregate so close to an urban center as here, just west of Highway 101, in these fading days of summer.

Or, you can venture out and look one in its mighty face.

The closer you get, the more remarkable the blue whale becomes.

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Setting off

AT 8:20 a.m., in still air and shirt-sleeve sunshine, the hawsers are let go, and Condor Express backs out of the landing in Santa Barbara Harbor.

From one direction comes the rattle-thump of a garbage truck on its Saturday rounds, and from the other point of the compass, the arf-arfing of sea lions on their routes. The demarcation of our coastline is always dramatic.

The Condor Express swings toward the channel, where the sea is empty except for flecks of birds on the go and the distant lump of Santa Rosa Island, our destination. There are 103 of us aboard this high-speed catamaran, built expressly for tracking and watching whales.

Suddenly, we’re stopped. Every big show needs a warm-up act.

Bottlenose dolphins are a common sight at the harbor mouth. Creasing the water with their torpedo antics, these impressive 600-pound, 12-footers are evidence that nature has a wry sense of play.

Less than half an hour later, another deceleration. This time we’ve encountered a pod of 400 or so smaller common dolphins. With sharp beaks and creamy bellies, these hams plunge underneath the boat in a jet trail of bubbles. They leap clear of the indigo water on the other side for the sake of getting in the photograph. Newborns among them flash through the sea like silver footballs seeking the end zone.

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Nostalgia

IF you went to grade school in the 1950s, you might carry the memory of the day you were told that you’d never see a blue whale. The lesson was delivered without sentiment, merely as fact. By the end of the 20th century, the blue whale would vanish, just like the dinosaurs. There was just not enough room on our crowded planet for so grandiose an animal.

Perhaps you can remember how that knowledge filled you with sadness, thinking how the blue whale survived the ravages of the 19th century whaling epoch just fine. Up to 100 feet long and perhaps 200 tons, the blue was too big for men to confront in their small whaleboats with hand-thrown harpoons.

Then, technology caught up with the whales. The invention of the harpoon gun with its exploding tip and the construction of mighty steam-powered factory ships sent men after the blues with gold-rush fervor. Something like 30,000 were killed each year between 1900 and 1966. Fewer than 10,000 of the epic beasts were thought to have survived, scattered across all the great oceans. Once in awhile in the intervening years a dead whale would reach shore to remind us that blues still existed.

Alisa Schulman-Janiger and her husband, Dave Janiger, met on a blue whale on July 6, 1980.

A freighter arrived in the Port of Los Angeles, reporting a loss of power. Something mysterious had happened at sea. The vessel could no longer cruise at speed. When it came to a stop in the harbor, to the astonishment of the ship’s crew, a blue whale floated to the surface, dead. It had been hit broadside and was wrapped around the ship’s bow.

Alisa climbed on the carcass to take photographs. Dave, a curatorial assistant, arrived to study the rare remains for the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. As she tells the story, it was love at first sight.

Today aboard the Condor Express, Schulman-Janiger is the resident naturalist for the American Cetacean Society, which has organized the trip as a fundraiser.

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In sight

ANOTHER change in velocity, only this time skipper Mat Curto mashes the throttles and the Condor Express accelerates.

From inside the boat, the vista through the windows disappears behind great sheets of spray as the boat bounces from swell to swell. Passengers, with cameras in hand and binoculars around their necks, brace themselves in the jouncing cabin and begin to inch toward the open deck. The big catamaran slows. People stream outside.

The time is 10:13 a.m., and the sun has disappeared. On the mainland, temperatures are rising into the 80s and 90s. But the Channel Islands are shivering under a marine layer.

“A humpback. Dead ahead. See the birds feeding?... There’s two.” Schulman-Janiger speaks over the vessel’s PA system.

Gouts of vapor rise, then a pair of angled backs, then the wing-shaped flukes. The skipper first caught sight of the whales not from the blows of a whale’s breathing, but from a colossal splash as one apparently breached.

Insofar as theatrics, the humpback is the superstar of whales. No other is so reliably “active” as these sleepy-faced giants, throwing their tails high into the air, sometimes leaping out of the water. Scientists wonder whether wriggling fish tickle the whales’ bellies as they feed, accounting for some of the nervous motion. The pair in front of us is feasting on what is presumed to be a concentration of anchovies not so far below.

One of them, perhaps a 45-footer, performs a headstand -- glistening flukes rising nearly two stories out of the water.

Wait, there are two pairs of humpbacks. No, three pairs. Cooperative hunters, they circle to herd the panicked anchovies into a vast bait ball. Then, in pairs they lunge into the fishy stew. Around us, the surface roils with more than 100 sea lions, barking and leaping into the air as they feed on leftovers. Hundreds more gulls and pelicans splash in and out of the water.

The whales surface every couple of minutes, the whoosh of their breathing is the sound of another world. The count of whales has risen to 10.

Sometimes the vapor from their blows drifts over the Condor Express, an eye-watering mist that smells of digesting fish sauce -- fertilizer in the making.

Veterans of the whale-watching scene smile happily when engulfed in the pungent fog. Ah, they remark with satisfaction, “Whale breath.”

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A solitary view

ALMOST as curious as the spectacle before us is that we have it to ourselves.

We are alone. No other boats are within sight, not one. The Condor Express runs trips seven days a week during the 260 or so days a year when whales of varying species are known to be in our local waters -- grays in the winter, humpbacks and blues in the warmer months, with occasional sperm and fin whales too. Skipper Curto says he rarely jockeys for position with other vessels. This is, after all, a big ocean.

“Think of the crowds lining up to ride the Jungle Cruise” at Disneyland, one passenger observes, pointing more or less in the direction of the horizon and Anaheim.

Whale-watching boats can be found from San Diego to San Francisco, and north to Seattle. A few are specialty craft like this one; others are moonlighting fishing boats. Worldwide, several years of double-digit growth have transformed whale watching into a $1-billion-plus industry, according to a study by Erich Hoyt of the International Fund for Animal Welfare. At last count, more than 9 million people in 492 communities in 87 nations go to sea annually in search of the goliaths.

As outdoor journeys go, whale watching is sedentary, passive, confining. When you are restrained as a mere passenger, the ingredients essential to an authentic sense of adventure are lacking, or if not lacking, then incomplete. There is no whiff of danger here, no call for self-reliance, no skill to be tested.

You must look deeper within yourself if you are to be more than just along for the ride. Provided you have a taste for such things, a trip offshore is a chance to recalibrate.

This is the world’s greatest remaining wilderness, more than 64 million square miles of it, right at our door. Phooey to those who say there is no mystery left on our planet. The Pacific is a wild land that touches our hearts according to what we know and what we can imagine.

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Taking a guess

IT seems like only a few minutes that we’ve been idling on the edge of this whale-encircled bait ball, but really it’s been nearly two hours.

On the flying bridge of the Condor Express, the captain reveals unexpected, if poorly timed, bad news. For all of the buildup, no one has reported seeing a blue whale in the channel for a week. Water temperatures have been rising, and the blues have moved on. Where?

At the controls, Curto can only guess.

Maybe they’ve gone west to the far edge of the Channel Islands. Or maybe they’ve gone north to Point Conception, beyond our range. Or perhaps they’re somewhere else entirely. There is a good deal of doubt in his voice. The ocean, we are reminded, is a very big place.

He makes a guess, throttles the engines and aims for the westernmost point in the archipelago, San Miguel Island. The morning calm has disappeared. Twenty knots of chilly wind hits the Condor Express in the teeth. The twin hulls of the catamaran can no longer plane smoothly over the rising chop. The boat bangs and hobby-horses into the uncomfortable rolling sea.

Stomachs rebel. Earlier in the day, only a handful of drowsy people held their heads in their hands, wishing they were somewhere else. Now the feeling is spreading with urgent dashes to the side of the boat. Lunch orders from the boat’s heaving galley are reluctantly retrieved or ignored.

Curto understands, but he also knows there are blue whales out here someplace. The Condor Express lunges ahead.

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‘So amazing’

BLUE whales are a relatively new phenomenon in Southern California -- or so it is believed.

Scientists suspect several things are at work. Since the 1980s, the continental shelf has produced a bounty of krill, the finger-sized shrimp-like creatures that a blue whale filters out of the water to the tune of four tons a day. Plus, the 1966 worldwide ban on hunting blues has allowed them to recover.

Perhaps just as important, people became aware of the whale in our midst. When we began looking carefully, we saw them. Who knows how long they’ve really been coming to these summer feeding grounds?

Biologist John Calambokidis, co-founder of Cascadia Research Collective, had been studying marine mammals for years when he was “shocked” to see his first blue whale near San Francisco’s Farallon Islands in 1986. Like the grade school boy, he figured that it was too rare and disbursed to ever actually see. “Then I was quite astounded to see 100 of them,” he recalled in a telephone interview.

By 1991, whales were seen by the score around the Channel Islands. Over the years, Calambokidis and others have estimated that a stable population of about 2,000 blues frequent the West Coast in summer, migrating from just above the equator off Costa Rica and Mexico to the krill-rich upwelling waters off Santa Barbara, and north all the way to British Columbia and even Alaska.

Are they really the largest creatures ever? Many scientists believe so. Some dinosaurs were as long as whales, or even longer, but are not believed to have weighed as much. Yet larger dinosaurs may still be discovered. In any event, there is no living animal that rivals the blue for bulk.

Calambokidis, coauthor of “Blue Whales,” knows the fun facts that circulate about this remarkable creature: Its heart weighs about the same as a small car. Its tongue is as heavy as an African bull elephant. A child could crawl through its arteries. A growing calf gains 188 pounds each day. It is the loudest animal in the world; the low-frequency rumble of the male blue whale, presumably a mating call, can travel from one side of the Pacific to the other, at least theoretically.

The most astonishing thing of all about Balaenoptera musculus, though, is its presence.

“There are facts and figures,” Calambokidis continued. “But then there is the feeling of actually seeing one. That’s really quite different....They are so mysterious, so amazing.”

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Blue tidings

AH, yes, to see one ...

Slam. Heave. Our bow wave splashes 20 feet in the air and then is torn apart by the wind. The Condor Express pitches and thumps into the swells. We are coming up on 2 p.m. Time seems to pass in slow motion, but we are still running out of it. The harbor is more or less straight astern. Bird watchers record a sooty shearwater and a darting storm petrel, plus a few migrating red-necked phalaropes.

Most eyes are fixed on the great circle of the horizon where gray sea meets gray sky. We are looking for a gush of vapor -- a blow three stories tall -- that will signify a surfacing blue. Nothing. Ahead in the mist looms the shadowy terminus of San Miguel Island and the outcrop of Castle Rock. Beyond that, Yokohama.

The skipper slows and turns toward the island for one last sweep. Curto has the eye. He’s seen something. Then another. “A blow. Straight ahead. Big one.” The boat advances steadily. There are murmurs.

“I won’t say ... until we’re closer,” Curto says. “It could be a fin whale,” a cousin 20% or so smaller that also visits these waters.

But a blue it is.

A huge blue. Gently swimming across our bow, it breaks the surface with a head like a Titan rocket. Then more of it follows, and more still. And yet more after that -- a vast, undulating grain silo moving through the choppy water, its glistening topside and the great bulk beneath reflecting the daylight and illuminating the dark sea.

Rhythmically, it blows, replenishing oxygen after diving and taking a throat-engorging gulp of krill. The ph-whoosh of its twin blowholes could be the sound of an air leak from deep inside the membrane of the planet.

Then something unexpected happens. The experts and whale-watching veterans start dancing on tiptoes.

Regal and blase, blues almost always ignore a boat nearby. They surface, breathe for a few moments and vanish again for 10 or 15 minutes at a spell. But this one turns to investigate, slow and wide, in the way a ship would change course.

Now, it is heading for us. Its colossal torso carves waves through the Pacific and churns up a trail of backwash. Gouts of steam jet skyward as it exhales.

The Condor Express is 75 feet long. This whale figures to be 80 feet, some aboard estimate 90 -- almost the length of a basketball court.

It comes alongside the starboard rail. A couple of car-lengths pass before a bulging, monstrous eye, still below the surface, glides by. For just an instant, the world of water meets the world above. All those years ago, the grade-school teacher was wrong, wonderfully wrong. The living proof fills you with joy.

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Snapshot / The long and short of it

The blue whale is the largest creature on the planet. Here’s how it stacks up:

Blue whale: Up to 100 feet long

Condor Express: 75 feet long

Humpback whale: 50 feet long

Gray whale: 45 feet long

African elephant: 13 feet tall

Human: 6 feet tall

Hollywood sign: 45 foot tall letters

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John Balzar can be reached at john.balzar@latimes.com.