Whales!

Big Sur is one of my absolute favorite places. I don’t visit frequently enough. Being there rejuvenates my passion for exploration and for wilderness. And though it has perhaps become more crowded over the years, one can still find relative quiet and a chance to be absorbed by the immensity of this rugged and beautiful place.

With my two youngest kids I took a day off work to camp and tidepool over an extended weekend. Long sunny days and cool temperatures – the weather was perfect.

We camped at Plaskett Creek, a small US Forest Service campsite just east of California highway 1 in the southern stretch of Big Sur. Given that the low tide was very early the next morning, it made for convenient tidepooling at nearby Sand Dollar Beach. The site is a wide sandy cove, buttressed along the whole shoreline by bluffs, except for a single point of access via a stairwell at the southern third of the cove. There are rocky intertidal areas at the northern and southern ends of the sandy beach.

Sand Dollar Beach

The encrusting sponge,
Haliclona.

On any visit to the coastal rocks my eye is trained for seaweeds, but my most significant impression of the intertidal biota on this visit was the abundance of Phragmatopoma californica, an annelid worm that constructs intricate dwellings of sand at the edge of intertidal rocks much like a marine beehive. The colonies seemed to be quite abundant, challenging my memory of whether they were so common on my visit to this same site years ago.

Returning to the plants, steel grey-green Porphyra were common on rocks in the high intertidal zone and from the mid-intertidal down there were rich coverings of seaweeds. Small individuals of giant kelp, Macrocystis pyrifera, were frequent in the lower intertidal and I also found about three small bull kelp sporophytes.

Bands of the light brown Phragmatopoma colonies lining intertidal rocks.

One of the treats of the long drive along the Big Sur coast was spotting 4 grey whales – three near Willow Creek (a beach access point near the outpost of Gorda) and one farther north. The group of three swam together close to the rocky shore for quite some time, surfacing briefly perhaps every minute or so. Their dark grey mottled backs would appear at the surface, or sometimes a lone flipper would poke into the air. They frequently swam close together, at some points appearing a pair appeared to be nestled together.

Grey whales, now mostly only a northeast Pacific species, migrate annually between Baja California and Alaska. These animals, the loitering in Big Sur aside (I can’t blame them), were probably on their way north. Today there are perhaps about 20,000 animals along the west coast of North America, so the chance to observe several on our trip was fantastic. 

A trio of grey whales surfacing together.

We also saw sundry other marine mammals.

Macrocystis pyrifera, giant kelp.

Fucus distichus, Silvetia compressa and various red seaweeds on intertidal rocks.