Whale Watching Dolphins and Arlington West
Sunday, September 30th, 2007Today we went to Santa Barbara to go whale watching. We arrived in Santa Barbara a little early and drove around the town. We stumbled upon somthing interesting at the beach next to the docks. Each Sunday Morning a group of volunteers set up a white cross for each soldier killed in the Iraq war. Every sunday afternoon they take the crosses down, store them, and create a new cross for any new casualty that ocurred during the week. This memorial is known as “Arlington West“. This was quite a chilling scene and a reminder of the high price of war.
At 10AM we boarded the boat to head out for the day. Everyone said the blue whales were gone, but we saw 6 (3 sets of 2).
The blue whale is the largest mammal on earth. The largest one we saw was 75 feet long. It was hard to capture a photo displaying their true size since their entire body never made it out of the water, but you could see them traveling just under the surface. We also so 4 large pods of the common dolphin and 1 pod of the risso dophin. The dolphins were fun to watch because the like to play in the wake of the boat.
-Susan
wow how time flies when you are having fun. We celebrated our anniversary in Ventura California. An oncology conference is what brought me to California so we decided to make a mini vacation out of it. We started out the day by taking a boat from Oxnard harbor to Anacapa Island which is part of the Channel Islands National Park (Our 7th US national park together, but my 10th). The island had an old light house that is still in use, inspiration point which had a beautiful view of the open ocean and the other islands, the iceplant which took over much of the island, a gull breading ground which ended a few weeks ago, and a healthy population of sea lions. During our trip to and from the island we saw pods of the common dophin. We ended our day with a great dinner in Ventura Harbor. What a great first anniversary!
