Looking For Whales

 Yesterday, we went to the coast to look for whales.  Grey whales usually migrate from Alaska to go and calve in the warmer waters off of Mexico.

At the Sea Lion Caves, we didn't see any whales.  The Child and I descended into the rocky depths to see the interior of the caves.  It was smelly.  The aroma of Stellar sea lions is not lovely, and I can only guess it's the combination of sea lion effluvia and dead fish remains of sea lion meals.  We could smell it along the ridge above the cave's entrance.  It was worse when we stepped off of the elevator and into the subterranean shadows.  Sea lion calls and crashing waves echoed within the dim confines of the grotto.  Red, blue, and green LED lights provided some light.

The sea lions rested--as well as they could--among the tumble of rocks lining the edge of a pool of pulsing sea water.  Foamy waves from the nearly high tide crashed in through the main opening of the cave and misted everything with spray.   There are three openings to the caves, a large one to the north, where people can enter (before 1962 by a now removed wooden tower of stairs), a small one to the south that typically looks like a rocky stairway to heaven (and is flooded during high tide), and a large oceanic entrance to the northwest which the sea lions swim in and out of.   There's probably certain days and hours when the sun can actually penetrate the cave, but we must not have been visiting then.  (The day, which had started out sunny, grew progressively cloudy and foggy.)

There were many sea lions in the cave.  One was perched like a ballerina on the highest rock; the majority rested along the edge of the pool and up the cave walls.  There was a baby parked right next to the concrete wall we stood behind, which was an exciting discovery--you had to stand right next to the low wall, press your head against the metal cable bars preventing humans from entering the grotto proper, and look down and over the wall as best you could to see the

I'm sure I'm projecting, but the Stellar sea lions looked like miserable wet things flung about the rocks--like a whole village of Gollums, or possibly the wretchedly muddy peasant village from the "Bring Out Your Dead" scene in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail."   The sea lions frolicking outside the cave in the Pacific waves looked much happier.  We looked for whales but didn't see any.

We did notice a spiky plant that looked like a cross between a succulent and rosemary.

We left the cave and continued our quest for whales.  We spent some time at Mary Hill Beach.  The Child stayed in the car while Mark and I went onto the thin strip of rocky beach, looked vaguely for agates and other interesting rocks, and were on our guard against sneaker waves.   We didn't find any agates because it was high tide, but there were some banded igneous rocks.  We also didn't see any whales.  The day became more overcast.

Then it was off to the Spouting Horn and Thor's Well.  I don't know why it's called Thor's Well.  The recently high tide crashed against the basalt plateau.  We walked along the bridge over Cook's Chasm and looked at the Spouting Horn from the south (which I'd never done before).  We looked for whales.

We watched some guy photograph his (presumably) girlfriend doing yoga poses over the chasm.  Mark offered critique of poses, and I made up pose names like, "Preening Mountain Slide Into the Ocean."  (I'm pretty sure this was a casebook example of taking one's main squeeze somewhere exhilarating because the physiological reaction to danger transfers to feelings of lustful arousal-- and they made out in the underbrush after their photoshoot.  Okay, they were practically making out on the trail above the crashing waves before the photoshoot.)

Spouting Horn spouted.  There was little wind, so the mist afterward hovered over the feature for an extended amount of time.  The waves beat themselves into a froth at the narrow end of Cook's Chasm, but weren't a thick blanket of dirty yellow foam (as they sometimes are) in the channel before the spout.   We didn't spot any whales.

We did see the light of a boat, far off to sea, and Mark remarked that crabbing season had just started, so we assumed it was a fisher-boat setting its crab-pots.

It wasn't safe to go down to Thor's Well for photographs, but that didn't stop someone with a tripod from approaching it.  They got a little wet, but stayed far enough away from the well to be in any great danger of being sucked into a basalt hole that is twenty feet deep and lined with sea anemones, and then pounded to death by tons ocean surge.  We looked and looked but we didn't see any whales.  Neither did the nice couple from Nebraska who said they'd come from farther north along the coast.

The cats were happy that we arrived home before Dinner Time instead of an hour afterward.

Maybe we'll see the whales some other day.