SOCAL-11 Day I -- Picking up where we left off

Short post here as we are in pretty spotty coverage off shore, but wanted to note that we succeeded in tagging two individual blue whales off Pt. Arguello just north of Point Conception today. Favorable offshore weather and good concentrations of animals enabled us to find multiple possible groups and attach a suction cup tag from each RHIB. After about three hours of baseline behavioral measurements and finding the right location to deploy the sound source in the right proximity to the whales but away from non-target animals. Quite a bit of time was spent getting away from a large number of sea lions, but we found the right spot and succeeded in completing a full controlled exposure experiment focusing on the tagged blue whales.

We will be anchoring offshore overnight tonight in a relatively remote harbor and hoping to work our way back south tomorrow. The offshore forecast looks to be deteriorating a little later tomorrow, but we wanted to be able to try up in this northern end of our operational area and were glad today worked out as it did. We had a few other interesting observations, including some sea lions eating large rockfish, a dead sea lion with a huge shark bite taken out of it, and a massive dead floating sunfish with birds walking all over it.

Great to start off with a double tag-out and a full CEE sequence while surveying in a new spot!