Leon Turnbull Photography

Well, here you are. What you all have been waiting for. Our big whale watching trip in San Francisco last weekend, to the Farallon Islands. How was it?

It was great, no doubt. As you may know, we originally planned this trip back in January on our birthday weekend. But it got postponed, due to some crazy weather happenings at the time. So this past weekend, we tried again. This time, the weather was sunny and warm.

The day started off a bit crazy. We had to be at the boat dock at 7:30AM. But I got lost on our way there, and I had forgotten to bring a map of the city. After asking someone for directions, we finally made it there, just in time. The second problem was the parking. There was supposed to be free parking at the dock, but it was all reserved. The “leader” of our group didn’t really know anything about parking. Frankly, I was quite pertubed about that. I had to find a parking spot on the street a couple blocks away. I made it back to the dock in the nick of time, before the boat was to leave.

My wife, Tara, was on board and had picked out a spot for us at the front. There was not much room on the ship for sitting down, really, as there were about 30 or so others in our group and the boat was fairly small. I wanted to sit up front for best photo ops, and that is where we stayed for the ride out to the Farallon Islands. But it was a very long ride out there. They are located 25 miles out in the ocean. On a clear day, you can see them from the mainland. But although it was sunny on this day, it was also hazy, and you couldn’t see the islands until we were almost there. It took about an hour to ride out there, and the further we got out in the ocean, the swells started getting a bit crazier and crazier. We were tossing up and down quite a lot. Sea sickness was not an issue for us (we took our Dramamine beforehand). But we did get splashed quite a bit, sitting up in the front of the boat. A couple times, we got drenched. But it was fun sitting up there. Most of the others on board decided to sit in the back of the boat, safe and warmer.

Out “leader” told us to keep a watch out for whales, that we could see them at any time. But we did not see any until well after we arrived at the islands. I was definitely wondering if we would even see any at all this day. What we did see on the trip out to the islands were: seals, porpoises, sea lions (California and Steller), and many birds including cormorants, common murres, and the pigeon guillemot. What we did not see were: great white shark, puffin, humpback or blue whales, all of which I really really really wanted to see, but I guess we were there at the wrong time of year to see these creatures.

As for whales, it was the right time of year to see the grey whale. After arriving at the islands, we made our way around to the south end of the islands, and voila. There they were. My wife thinks there were more than 2, but I think there was just a couple of them there. They were just swimming around in that area (feeding, I suppose). They would surface for a few minutes, blow water out their holes, then flick their tails up in the air and dive down underwater for about 5 minutes. We sat watching them like this for about an hour or more. Mostly, they would surface quite a ways from the boat. I took many pictures, but they were just a bit far away for the lens that I had. One time, however, and only once, a whale surfaced very close to the boat. The photos you see here were all taken during that close encounter event, all within about one minute. It was very cool. I was using a 70-200mm lens with a 1.4x extender for my photos. I really wished I had a longer lens for this trip, but I’m not a rich man. Next time, maybe, I’ll be able to take a bigger lens.

On the return trip to San Francisco, we spotted another whale just outside the Golden Gate Bridge. We stopped to watch it for 20 minutes or so. There was a lot of boat traffic in this area and once, the whale surfaced very close to a sailboat. I was watching the boaters through my telephoto lens, and I don’t think they even noticed the whale at all, even though it was probably within 100 feet of them. There was also a heckuva lot of porpoises and sea lions in this area. Some of those came very close to our boat as well. It is rather difficult to get a photo of them, though I did get one of a sea lion close to the boat.

Here’s another whale pic:

And a collage of the same whale, shots taken in quick succession:

After checking into our hotel in San Francisco, my wife and I had an early dinner sitting out on the streets of the city and watching all the strange people walk by. There are definitely quite a few of them in that city. One guy walked into the restaurant where we were with two little dogs labeled “therapy dogs”. Apparently, they are some type of service dog for emotionally distressed people. I had not heard of them before. We speculated amongst ourselves why this guy needed therapy dogs. On the other side of the street was a crippled man preaching to passersby about Jesus. We could not really hear what he was saying cuz of all the traffic noise. It is always an adventure on the streets of SF.

Afterwards, we drove up to the Marin Headlands and Rodeo Beach for sunset. There were only a couple clouds in the sky. There wasn’t going to be any spectacular sunset this night. But I tried to make good use of those 2 clouds. I waited until after the sun had set, and for the clouds to light up with a bit of color. Then I captured a long exposure to get that really neat looking smooth look on the ocean water. This exposure was about 4 seconds long. I’m definitely pleased how it turned out.

This past weekend was a pretty cool one for us. My wife and I went whale watching in San Francisco. More on that later. First though, we went to Boulder Creek Falls up at Whiskeytown Natl. Rec. Area, in Redding. The original plan was that my wife would drive the kids up to the grandparents (in Red Bluff) on Thursday, then drive back down to pick me up at home, and then head off to SF from there. Then I had a wild and crazy thought. What if I went up to Red Bluff as well, and my wife and I go hiking to a waterfall on Friday morning before going down to SF. She always says she never gets to go hiking with me, and this was the perfect opportunity to do so sans kids. She liked that new plan. But then I broke this dandy little bit of tidings to her: we would have to get up at 4:45AM, in order to get up to the park and start hiking early enough to make it to the waterfall by around sunrise. A necessary thing if one is going to get photos of the waterfall in good light, which is what I wanted to do. Now my wife is NOT a morning person. She is about as far from a morning person as one can get. And she objected. And she protested. And she balked. But she did not revolt. In the end, she consented to get up that early to go with me. And to her great credit, she did not complain once on Friday upon waking up or during the hike. Indeed, we had a fabulous morning hiking to the waterfall and back, and didn’t see anyone else all morning. After the hike I asked her if she thought it was worth it to get up so early and get out and enjoy the glorious nature without anyone else around. She answered “absolutely”. But it didn’t really sound too convincing. We’ll see about next time.

Now Boulder Creek Falls is really a nice waterfall, dropping in three separate cascades totaling 96 ft. in height. This lower section is the largest, 46 ft. high. It is not a particularly photogenic waterfall, however. There are loads of branches and tree limbs and logs all over the place, preventing a clear view of the falls. I was hoping that somehow, I would be able to find a great, unobstructed, composition of the falls. But that is just impossible here. Nonetheless, it is still a very lovely waterfall to visit.

Since I did not get any new pics from last weekend, here is another from my outing to South Fork Silver Creek Falls. This is another of the many cascades along this creek. This one is about 15 ft. high. The kayaking community calls it “Plastic Surgery” (hmmm, I wonder how they came up with that one?). I had to scramble a bit down a steep snow-covered bank to get into position to take the photo.

Well, I did not get out hiking this past weekend. I did have plans to go somewhere, but it was one of those nights where I could not fall asleep, and really didn’t want to get up at the crack of dawn. So … I slept in.

I did, however, finish updating my waterfallswest website (essentially), converting it all over to PHP and mySQL. I’m sure that really doesn’t excite you too much, but it does excite me. Indeed, if you browse through my site now, you probably won’t notice “too much” that is different. However, I did change some colors, and added some new features (such as, a link to Google Maps, and some neat sorting capabilities on my map and Alphabetical index pages). The reason it excites me is that it is now going to be a heckuva lot easier for me to maintain. If I want to change the layout of my site (or any colors), for example, I only have to change one or two pages, instead of over 400 pages. Plus, it will be much easier to change or add new waterfall pages to my site now. I still have some more things to change over on the site, but I did get all 400+ waterfall pages converted. So I’m definitely happy about that.

In other stuff … next weekend will be an exciting weekend for myself and my wife. We are going to San Francisco for the weekend, and going whale watching to the Farallon Islands. We had this trip set up to do back in January, but it got postponed due to bad weather. That re-scheduled date is now upon us. It should be an exciting time, and hopefully, I’ll have some great photos to share from it. The long-range forecast this time looks all right too, thankfully.