Three-Day Gray

A large gray whale arrived in the Grapeview channel on Saturday. By Tuesday morning it had moved on. Call it a three-day gray.

I first noticed the whale (if noticed is the right word when you are talking about whales) on Saturday evening. It was a dark quiet night so I couldn’t see it, but I could hear the whale each time it surfaced to breathe. The noise made as a gray whale exhales the old stale air in its lungs is forceful and sudden. It doesn’t build in intensity. There’s silence one moment followed by an explosive whoosh the next. And then more silence. If you’ve heard it before, you know what it is.

On Sunday morning there was visual confirmation. First a few cell phone photos and videos were taken from the shore by early risers who woke to find a gray whale in the channel between the north end of Treasure Island and the mainland. Later a flotilla of kayakers went out for a closer look with some trying to guess where the whale might surface next so they could get there first. Crazy and not something I would do. Orcas, the rock stars of the whale world, attract more attention when they visit Case Inlet, but this big marine mammal got plenty of notice as social media helped spread the word.

Undeterred, and luckily for the kayakers, the whale ignored them and concentrated on its primary mission – finding food. It continued to make periodic dives to the bottom of the channel searching for any food morsels it could strain out of the mud and sand with its comb-like baleen plates. This went on all day and on Monday too as the whale methodically covered both sides of the channel.

The photo I posted, taken by my friend W on Sunday morning, shows the whale in mid channel just after surfacing.

Although the whale was 80 miles or more from the West Coast gray-whale migration route, grays apparently need to keep finding new feeding grounds and are known to wander into quiet shallow bodies of water like the Grapeview channel. So, while rare, this wasn’t the first one seen near Treasure Island. In 2009 I wrote a blog post, Our Gray Went Away, about a gray whale, dubbed Cortez, that spent several weeks in the Grapeview channel one summer in the mid- to late 1990’s.

Due to smart phones and social media there’s plenty of evidence that the 2026 whale was here for a visit, but its short three-day stay wasn’t long enough for it to attract much of a following or be given a name.