It's a cetacean celebration in the Sea of Cortez! We saw the "B"s today: blue whales, Bryde's whales and bottlenose dolphins. The early morning sighting was the Bryde's whale. The next whale welcome to Baja California was an extremely close encounter with three or more blue whales, including some that saluted us with their flukes (see inset). One individual surfaced beside the ship and sent us scrambling for wide angle lenses! In the end, all we could do was watch in slack-jawed amazement as the enormous being cruised past us, then dove into the depths.
About forty bottlenose dolphins ended our morning with a bow-riding performance just before the call to lunch. Whew, what a morning!
An afternoon on Isla Santa Catalina followed, with a side-to-side meeting with the largest barrel cactus species in the world. This seemed a suitable sequel to our morning with the largest animal to ever live on earth.
