Not quite a whale doing the backstroke in your soup, it was still a rare spectacle none the same Monday when a whale and dolphins were seen playing together in front of passengers and crew on a Dana Point Harbor sightseeing boat.
“It was pretty amazing,” remarked eyewitness Patti Soltero of Eastvale. “Definitely a lifetime experience.”
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Captain Dave Anderson of Captain Dave's
Dolphin and Whale Safari rolled up on a gray whale making its southward migration from Alaska to Baja. The beast then turned on its back while playing with frolicking Pacific white-sided dolphins.
“I've never seen a gray whale do the backstroke before,” Anderson is heard saying on a Captain Dave's video of the encounter. “He was swimming upside down, trying to entice these guys to swim over his belly.”
The show off the Orange County coast lasted about 10 minutes before the whale dove straight down, as if the curtain had been dropped.
It's been a good season for Capt. Dave visuals as his YouTube we just referenced here . . .
[VIDEO:] Local Waters Overrun (Overswum?) by “Dolphin Stampede”
. . . has already received more than 2.6 million views.
Who knew whales were made of ham?
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.