[CINC] CX on June 1

[Joel E. Justin]

Dick,
 
I think we had your little sea lion on the pier at SCI today. I noticed a small sea lion hauled out on the beach west of the pier as the 9:30 boat arrived. As Tiffany was doing the camper orientation, he (she) climbed up to where all the camping gear was and started poking around it. It had everyone's attention and was obviously not afraid of people. Not knowing it's history at the time, we couldn't figure out what it was doing! We did all we could to keep the visitors away from it, but that was hard as it kept coming up to people. Finally the crowd dispersed and it went to sleep on a rock right where the pier connects to the land. We relayed the tag number (23046) to Capt. Anthony who was moored. He radioed the CX and they confirmed that it was the rehab sea lion you released on Wed. As the 10:30 boat was arrived, it perked up and started heading down the pier. There were some kayaks stacked along the railing and I used them to block his further progress. It decided to try to go between the kayaks and the edge and finally decided that wasn't going to work, so looked down at the water and dove right in! Everyone on the Vanguard was watching and cheered when it hit the ater and swam slowly around. Fortunately, it swam away and wasn't seen until departure time, when it was a it with the 4th grade school group waiting to depart. It's pretty challenging keeping people away from this little guy as he obviously has no fear of humans and is quite adorable. It makes enforcing the MMPA difficult. We put the sign out to try to help. Hopefully it figures out that he should be a little more afraid of people and will go on its way. If not, it may have to be relocated because hanging around Scorpion will not be good for it in the long run. Do you have any idea of the sex and age of this little sea lion?
 
Joel...

 


Date: Wed, 1 Jun 2011 21:24:11 -0700
From: dbellman28 at gmail.com
To: channel_islands_naturalist_corps at rain.org
Subject: [CINC] CX on June 1

The bottom line from today's trip aboard the Condor Express:  


one pod of very "frisky" common dolphins
two Humpbacks; a cow-calf pair
6 Blue Whales with numerous surrounding spoutsToday's trip included roughly 45 passengers, with a large contingency of British and Scandanavian (Finland, Sweeden, Denmark) along with residents of Florida, Oklahoma, Colorado and a smattering of Californians.  Captains Matt and Dave headed the CX east in hopes of avoiding the winds that were to be building in the western portion of the channel.  Our initial sighting was the pod of very frisky, aka very amorous common dolphins.  Outstanding looks with a significant amount of mating behavior taking place. Our next sighting was the cow-calf pair of Humpbacks.  Passengers were treated to numerous looks.  However Sally Eagle on PID was not presented with many photo-ops of tail flukes.  Moving further east towards the east end of Santa Cruz where there have been sightings of Blues.  We did, indeed, encounter Blues at about the same time the wind that was supposed to be in the west and not pick up till late in the day moved east and picked up early.  Captains Matt and Dave worked diligently to take us back into the weather to get looks at the Blues of which there were more than the 6 that were documented.  We also released a juvenile California Sea Lion that have been rescued from (true story) the living room of a home approximately 1/2 mile from the beach.  Amazing.  The trip back was rugged to say the least.  With spray reaching all uncovered portions of the boat there was no way those affected with the mal de mer could deal with their malady at the rail. The last dose of over the wheelhouse spray occurred as we reached the green harbor buoy!!!  Almost the entire load was in the cabin and Brooke was busy meeting people needs.  In addition to Sally on PID, Laura Shelton was the other naturalist.  
Dick 














_______________________________________________ Channel_islands_naturalist_corps mailing list Channel_islands_naturalist_corps at rain.org http://www.rain.org/mailman/listinfo/channel_islands_naturalist_corps 		 	   		  
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.rain.org/pipermail/channel_islands_naturalist_corps/attachments/20110603/98f09899/attachment.html>