I love boat rides in general but the idea of whale watching seemed exciting and yet I was skeptical since you always here of stories of not seeing anything. We decided to take a chance and packed up the kids on the last day of Spring 
Break and headed up to Laguna Beach for the night to see family and then the next morning we headed 20 minutes north to take advantage of a Groupon for Davey’s Locker Whale Watching and Dolphin Tour. I’ve never taken one of these tours, mostly because no one wanted to go with me on a 3 hour boat ride and not see anything. But I had a good feeling about this trip. We took the coast route to Balboa Island and then took the Auto Ferry across to the Newport Landing and Balboa Fun Zone. The kids loved it. We had over an hour to hang out until our noon boat tour so we walked to the Balboa Pier which is entertain with shops and eateries. We took a walk over to the
beach for a bit and then walked to the end of the pier and there was a couple gray whales going by in the distance and a small pod of dolphins. How cool was that! We hoped to see them up close on our tour. We made our way back to the Fun Zone for some lunch and a little arcade action and then got in line to board our boat.
Our boat had an upper deck with a cover so we headed up there for the “3-hour tour”. We didn’t get stranded on Gilligan’s Island, but we ended up in the middle of a SUPER POD of 1000s of dolphins in every direction!!! This was amazing to see. They were surfing our wake and would swim right along our boat. We enjoyed this entertainment for about and hour and then the captain thought we should start heading back and maybe find a whale. It was the end of of migrating season being that it was April but he had high hopes after seeing the gray whales this morning. About 15 minutes later, the announcement was made that we were in luck. An adolescent humpback whale was in the area and we were going to hopefully get a glimpse of it. Su
re enough there it came to the surface, spouting his water in the air. The whale hung out with the boats for quite a while. Although he didn’t breech or show us his tale, we did see his back and experience the breathtakingly horrible “whale breath” that resulted after his water spouts. Wow…could’ve done without that smell for a lifetime. LOL. The boat ride was really a great adventure for the boys as we saw what we were hoping for along with a rare siting of a Harbor Seal and her pup along the jetty and plenty of sea lions hanging out. The crew was great and adventure was even better! He said that due to the high levels of krill in the water this year, they are expecting a exciting return of the whales as they return South this summer, so we might go again. Groupon is back with another great deal with Davey’s Locker!. 😉
