Well! We are back from our Baja adventures and the wonderful gray whales of the pacific lagoons. We all enjoyed ourselves enormously and the whale watching was superb. Gray whale calves nudging the boat along with it’s head and huge adult animals, 45 feet long and weighing in at around 40 tonnes lying next to the boat while excited whale watchers scratch the top of her rostrum and marvel at the barnacle growth around the enormous blow holes…

When exposed to this type of experience where one of the largest mammals on earth comes in close to a boat and allows it’s excited human inhabitants to lean out and rub their hands along the jawline and around the eye, with it’s calf right lying over it’s tail stock, it is hard to believe you are not in some form of virtual reality theme park. You are not though…

…these are wild animals that travel thousands of miles from their Alaskan feeding grounds to the warm and tranquil lagoon waters of Baja, Mexico to calve and rear their young during their early weeks…before making the return journey and running the gauntlet of predatory packs of killer whales in Monterey Bay and the rigours of a 5,000 mile journey into the cold waters of the Arctic.

Here are a selection of the images we took. Drop me a line if you are interested in our 2013 programme for watching Baja’s fabulous gray whales.