Self Portrait: My California Gray Whale Encounter

This illustration is actually entitled "Self Portrait" and was drawn by me in February 1982 for me as me at age twenty experiencing a real "Bucket List" moment.

In February 1982, three hundred yards off the Orange County Marine Institute's beach at the juncture of where the Dana Point Harbor's Main Jetty intersects with the firm ground of the south base of the Dana Point Headlands promontory; I was snorkeling near a number of large female California sea lions and one enormous six hundred pound bull from a dive raft tied to a chain hanging off the big red sea lion buoy when a northbound mother Eschrichtius robustus California gray whale and her baby encountered me.

The big bull Zalophus californianus sea lion had slid off the buoy into the water and had been aggressing me and nipping at my swim fins when he suddenly flipped away and disappeared. Looming behind me from the south was Mama and Baby. She was as big as an Orange County Transit District bus. The calf who was as big as a 2021 Dodge Charger was fat from Mama's whipping cream thick, "shrimpy"-tasting teat milk, was growing long, rubbery individual single hairs out of each smooth pit or indent as large as a cup holder arrayed in non-perfect rows along the length of his or her rostrum (The front of a baleen whale skull that holds the twin rows of baleen in the top of their mouths where teeth used to be in their ancestors).

On Mom's left side, especially around her head were clusters of a large species of whale barnacles, who clung to areas scarred or not scarred by prior clumps, along with tiny spidercrab-like crawly whale lice that clung in between each barnacle, eating pealing whale skin. On her right side, it was utterly smooth, though scarred to a far lesser degree. I found out years later in 1988 that this was because one of the ways she fed was to dive to the sandy, mucky bottom and scoop up a mouthful of sand while twisting (Rolling) to her right, thus dislodging any and and most all unfortunate barnacles or lice into the sand. In the sand which she filtered with her armored tongue and through the cartilaginous baleen strands were tiny mole crabs, isopods and crabs of all sorts.

I had left the house at eleven AM on a Saturday with the intention to be gone all weekend because I had been fighting with my father. All I can say is this is an actual self portrait of me at age twenty and she and her baby must have been from San Ignacio Lagoon in Baja California where up to a third of these rather aggressive and intolerant whales have turned utterly friendly toward humans reaching out to pet them from boats. She allowed me to touch her lips and the baby before moving along.

The seawater displacement in the water column of their movement as they departed, dragged me under and deep for a considerable distance. My lungs were bursting by the time I regained the surface, a full sixty feet further away from the Coast Guard's big red buoy than where I was positioned when she and the baby dove away. They blessed me by not inadvertently smacking me with their flukes.

Following this incident, I sped straight home, showered, cleaned my gear and then spent the next sixteen hours feverishly drawing this experience at the formal dining room table in Monarch Bay Terrace, neither eating nor sleeping until this render was done. That same Spring, just a month later, I met Whale Wall Artist Robert Wyland at the Hotel Laguna and my grandmother and I went on to assist him as he airbrushed his very first "Whaling Wall" on the concrete retaining and reinforcement wall of the Pacific Coast Highway parking lot for the Downtown Laguna Beach Hotel Laguna.

I still get really emotional when I think about this event--Not Wyland and his wall!--The mama and her baby whale pair!