‘Unexpected but welcomed’ killer whales sighted off the coast of Newport Beach
Whale-watching tours can’t always promise passengers will be able to see whales, but those who went out last weekend with Newport Coastal Adventure were treated to rare sightings of a pod of orcas.
Killer whales live and thrive in oceans all over the world but are typically found in colder waters toward Antarctica, Norway and Alaska, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. But some of the most well-studied killer whale populations live in the northern Pacific Ocean. The pod seen through Monday this week were identified as Eastern Tropical Pacific killer whales.
The orcas, which are endangered largely by human activity, tend to spend the majority of their time off the coast of Mexico but occasionally swim up north. The last such sighting of this pod was reportedly in 2019, though Capt. Ryan Lawler said he saw them off the coast of Ensenada in 2021.
Lawler said the first sightings this weekend began on Dec. 11 by passengers on the the Catalina Express ferry traveling from Long Beach to Catalina Island.
“We subsequently launched two of our boats from Newport Beach to go watch them. The ferry has to go to Catalina, so they don’t stop a long time. They just radioed, ‘We saw killer whales,’ and we found them again off Rancho Palos Verdes, but then they weren’t seen for a couple of days,” Lawler said. “I personally found them again off of Anacapa Island off of Oxnard [on the 15th]. They’re moving around.
“We’ve been able to track their movements and get Newport Beach passengers on them. Whether the whales are near Catalina, Rancho Palos Verdes, San Diego, wherever we can. They want to see the killer whales and see them in the wild. It’s a rare opportunity to see them in the wild off the coast of Southern California.”
Lawler said there were sightings off of the coast of Catalina Island on Saturday, then again off Newport Beach’s coast on Sunday. Last sightings were reported on Monday near San Diego, though Lawler confirmed none of his vessels had spied the pod as of Tuesday afternoon.
The scarcity of their sightings, he said, largely has to do with the fact that killer whales are apex predators, meaning they are often on the move to hunt their prey.
“We’ve seen these killer whales off of San Diego and Newport in several previous years, but they’ve only ever been seen one other time in the Santa Barbara channel. It’s pretty unexpected but welcomed. The whale-watching enthusiasts are going wild. Our capacity was around 20 per trip, and we were selling out the trip in less than an hour and oftentimes in about 30 minutes,” Lawler said. “All we would do is make an Instagram story. ‘Hey, we’re going to look for killer whales tomorrow; does anyone want to come?’ Twenty-three people signed up in less than an hour every time.
“We call them whale geeks … but even people who aren’t whale geeks are fascinated by the idea of seeing an apex predator along our coast and a lot of these encounters, they were hunting dolphins. It was pretty impressive spectacle.”
Lawler thinks the whales might have been seen farther north because of the relatively calm seas and temperatures prior to Tuesday, when rainstorms began in Southern California. He noted it was odd to see them outside of summer and that more typical for this time of year are humpback , fin and gray whales, as the latter is beginning its migration season.
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