Beach life – Eric’s World
A humpback cruises the Catalina Channel. Photo by Eric Martin/Manhattan Beach Pier Roundhouse Aquarium
The weather started getting rough. The tiny ship was tossed. If not for the courage of the fearless crew, the Minnow would be lost. The Minnow would be lost.
Eric Martin is many things. He’s the co-director of the Manhattan Beach Roundhouse Aquarium. He is a long-time oceanographic educator, teaching kids of all ages about whales and other local marine life since back when Marineland was a thing. He’s a world-class photographer and videographer, specializing in filming and documenting the gorgeous whales, dolphins and orcas that frequent Santa Monica Bay and the Catalina Channel. He’s a fashion icon, if your idea of fashion is wild, brush-optional hair, a once-red boating jacket that may have last been washed when Marineland was still open, and gnarled, tanned bare feet, on a January day when it feels like a runny nose could produce icicles.
But for me, right now, Eric is a laughing, wild-eyed combination of Gilligan and The Skipper. And just as in the song, the weather is getting rough. We’re bounding across the Pacific, somewhere between San Pedro and Catalina, in his 22-foot whale-watching boat, searching for signs of intelligent underwater life. There had been recent sightings of Orcas — Killer Whales — and Humpback Whales in the Catalina Channel, along with Risso’s Dolphins, Bottlenose Dolphins, huge pods of the ubiquitous Common Dolphins and the usual migrating Grey Whales commuting between Alaska and Mexico. We were out to find, see, hear, shoot, film and document any or all of the above.
One of the largest animal that has ever lived, a Finback Whale, and one of the smallest boats, Eric Martin’s mini Minnow, get together off Redondo Beach. Eric can be seen in the front of the inflatable, hunched over his laptop, controlling the photo drone above. All whale photos by Eric Martin.
Stormy, not Daniels
Eric had called me that morning after he had checked the weather. “There’s a storm coming in,” he had said, as I blinked my eyes over my first morning coffee. “But it looks like we won’t get rain or high winds until noon or later, and we’ll try to get back in before it hits.”
Sure we will.
I’m hanging on for dear life with both hands on the stainless steel superstructure, my feet braced on the salt-wet fiberglass deck. We’re leaping off white-cap swells and bashing back into huge holes in the ocean, like an old New York taxi dodging taxi-sized potholes. When the boat leaps I swing backward and up, and when it lands I lurch forward and down, using every bit of my knees flexion to cushion the blow. I skied Big Bear two days earlier. This is harder on my legs. My hands are freezing. I had brought nice winter gloves, but I had taken them off to use my camera, and now, blasting through this no-man’s land of towering, 50-degree seawater, I had no intention of letting go of my handholds long enough to grab them.
Eric looks like he’s coasting through a lazy day at the office. He’s in his spare swivel chair, protected by a nice, warm console and windshield, steering with his bare toes, which look as natural on the helm as my hands do on my Miata’s steering wheel.
“Are you OK?” he asked.
“Yuh, yuh, yuh, yes.” I stammered, driven to my knees, as we slammed into another wall of hard gray ocean.
A baby Grey Whale takes a break for a spy hop, to check out the South Bay.
Shooting the Whales
As initially advertised, the day had started out much smoother, warmer and drier.
“We’ve got all the cool gear with us,” Eric had said at the Cabrillo Beach launch ramp, just a few hours earlier. ‘We’ve got my camera drone, so we can film any animals we find from above, away from the boat. And we’ve got our GoPro torpedo, which we can trail behind the boat to film any Orcas or Dolphins that come up behind us.”
If you want to experience Eric and his ocean-going video skills in action — and you do, if you want to see a super pod of Bottlenose Dolphins cruising in the blue-green water off Manhattan Beach, or see Eric face to face with an Orca, or watch the largest animal that has ever lived, a Blue Whale, feeding off Redondo Canyon, with Eric’s tiny inflatable boat bobbing in its wake — just Google “Eric Martin, whales, youtube”, and make yourself comfortable. You’ll be there awhile.
Once past the Angel’s Gate lighthouse, past the dormant yachts and lurking container ships, we headed out toward the east end of Catalina. The water was nearly flat and the sky was battleship grey — we could see the first tendrils of storm clouds creeping in from the south. “It may look like we’re just wandering around, without any real direction,” Eric said. “But we know where the most recent Humpback Whale and Orca sightings have been, so it’s not as random as it seems.” Using his GPS screen on the center console, with its depth chart and sonar-fed fish finder, he could navigate out in the Channel as if he was turning into his driveway.
“You never know what we’re going to find out here. Or not find,” he said
Humpbacks and Orcas and Sperms. Oh my!
“The Humpbacks feed mostly on anchovies, and the anchovies tend to congregate along the undersea shelf this side of Catalina” he said. We zipped along, skipping over the slight chop, eyes peeled for any sign of life. “Let me know if you see anything out of the ordinary — splashes, birds circling or diving, anything at all.”
We swiveled and peered, sweeping the horizon for the breaching Humpbacks or patrolling Orcas we knew were waiting for us. After we had gone to all this trouble, launching the boat, putting on seven layers of clothing — it was the least they could do. We could see the line of oil rigs off Huntington Beach, far to the south, sliding along our left gunwale.
A few miles out, I spotted something churning in the distance, about a quarter mile to our right. “There’s something at three o’clock,” I yelled. “Common Dolphin?” I asked, surprised that if something out there was worth seeing, I was the first to see it. “Yes,” said Eric, spinning the steering wheel and pushing the throttle forward. “Nice spotting. Looks like a superpod.”
I grinned like a precocious first grader.
Eric Martin cleans up nice, as does the Roundhouse Aquarium, after its extensive remodel and renovation. Photo (CivicCouch.com)
Uncommonly fun
Common Dolphin are, well, common, at least in the Catalina Channel. Which doesn’t mean they are not hilarious fun to be around. We were soon surrounded by hundreds of leaping, swerving, bounding bundles of open-ocean joy. Dark grey, with a lighter grey wave toward the tail, off-white underneath, and a characteristic dirty beige crescent sweeping back from behind their eyes, they are about half the size of the flipper-like Bottlenose Dolphins we see patrolling the surf line in threes, fours and fives. Some arced over to greet us, riding our bow wave for the sheer fun of it, not three feet from our bouncing little vessel. Common Dolphins are relatively tiny, as toothed whales go, and their babies, jumping gamely along with the rest of the pod, are about the cutest things you have ever seen. They are perfect streamlined replicas of their mommies and daddies, but are only about two feet long. It would be a very, very bad idea to subject one to captivity, and next to impossible to actually accomplish. But every time I see one, I have an irrational urge to take it home and play with it in the bathtub.
Common Dolphins do not do well in captivity, but a few injured or beached examples, once nursed back to health, have found themselves sharing the Bottlenose Dolphin digs at places like SeaWorld San Diego. One particularly ambitious male Common Dolphin, unable to return to the wild, yet bored to tears by his plight as a shut-in, managed to impregnate four different, much larger female Bottlenoses, resulting in four hybrid Common-Bottle calves, one of which, in turn, had a calf of her own with a Bottlenose Dad. He too, I guess, wanted a baby dolphin or two to play with in his own, much-larger bathtub.
Spinning a yarn
These Short-Nosed, Common Dolphin reminded me of the spectacular Spinner Dolphins I’ve seen around the Hawaiian Islands (and can also be seen in the Catalina Channel). And one special Spinner, one with a unique sense of humor, in particular. Twenty-two years ago, on a scuba trip from Maui over to Lanai, our dive boat wandered into a pod of these leaping, spinning, flopping goofballs.
“Get into your snorkeling gear and get into the water!” our dive master yelled. “Sometimes these guys will come over and play with you.”
Most of the pod had wandered away while I was scrambling into my gear. But as I wheezed along on the surface I spotted four lagging Spinners, cruising about 10 feet under me, slowly pulling away. I was just about to give up the chase when one of the podlet turned his head to see me, then slowly rose in the water column until he was right in front of me.
“This is amazing,!” I thought. “We’re going to have a warm, spiritual, interspecies encounter!”
Which is when he crapped, right in my face. The good news is this: if you going to be crapped upon by a 200-pound animal, the best place to do it is in the middle of the Pacific. The grey cloud of digested fish guts just swept right past me, leaving me to imagine the smell I couldn’t smell because of my dive mask.
Tuna casserole
I could have stayed with the Commons all day, but Eric was after bigger prey. We resumed our journey toward the East End of Catalina, with Eric chatting back and forth over his cell phone with other whale-watching enthusiasts, as well as his son, Cody, who was out in the Channel on his own boat. Recent sightings of prized Bluefin Tuna had inspired a small flotilla of sport-fishing boats clustered, out of our sight, near the oil rigs to the south.
So, of course, we whale watchers stumbled into a huge, thrashing school of Bluefin. Seagulls and other diving, scrapping sea birds wheeled over the school, hoping to snatch an errant anchovy. Every now and then we spotted a big tuna, tail vibrating, flying out of the churning scrum of terrified anchovies, opportunistic birds, and white water. The school would rise, trying to pin the anchovies at the surface, then just as quickly disappear in pursuit of the diving baitfish. The birds would then circle high overhead in small groups, until they spotted the next episode in the fish versus fish drama. The tuna chased the anchovies, the birds chased the tuna, and we did the best we could, darting around the ocean like a cat chasing a laser pointer.
Eric was all over his cellphone, reading off GPS coordinates to his so-far fishless son Cody. We hadn’t come out this far to see tuna, but Eric was determined to stay with the school until Cody and his friends arrived. When they did, Eric borrowed a fishing pole and fed out a line and lure to troll behind our boat, in case a tuna had a sudden lapse of sense and decided to turn itself into sashimi.
I am a wimp when it comes to hunting, death and blood, so the last thing I wanted was to have a massive Bluefin pulled up on deck, thrashing its life out. Still, with all this talk of tuna, I couldn’t help but think of a big, juicy Jersey Mike’s tuna sub. All the veggies. No jalapeños.
Caught by Eric’s wandering drone, a pod of Risso’s dolphins cruises for lunch off Manhattan Beach.
Imperfect Storm
Cody’s boat wandered off to the northeast, trailing a kite which, in turn, trailed a fake flying fish skipping over the waves, a rubber lure with a big, nasty hook in its tail. By now the weather was getting rough, the boat rolling and pitching as we made our way. We could see the spiral arms of the storm filling the sky to the south, with tendrils of rain glowing in the filtered sun. Eric headed us back toward PV, his toes steady on the helm, as he called local whale watchers for clues. The whale-watching crew up on the deck at Point Vicente, near the lighthouse we could see blinking in the distance? No luck. The whale watching boat out of King Harbor? Crickets.
We bashed back toward White’s Point, into the corridor where Grey Whales tend to migrate this time each year, from Alaska down to Baja California, to give birth and mate in one of the famous lagoons on the Pacific side of the Peninsula. Early January is prime time for seeing Greys cruising through here, but the whales had apparently failed to open that email. Nothing.
“Well, guys, I’m sorry we haven’t seen any big whales today, but that’s the way it goes sometimes.” said Eric. “We’ve been seeing both Orcas and Humpbacks in these waters this winter, but I guess we’re not going to get lucky today. You never know what you’re going to find out here. Back in 2016, 40 or so huge Sperm Whales showed up in the channel — a pretty rare sighting.”
Eric finally threw in the towel—a towel I was going to need for my face, my glasses, my camera lenses, and, if things went badly, cleaning my face after ralphing overboard. The final few miles were straight out of Gilligan’s Island — the part where the tiny ship was tossed. I was amazed the boat could take the repeated slamming into what felt like concrete, loose parts rattling and shaking with every hit.
The ultimate lifeguard
Despite the relative lack of big-whale sightings (Short-Nosed Common Dolphin, the ones we saw at the beginning of the trip, are technically whales as well), it was an inspiring, eye-opening, exhausting experience. After seeing Eric in action, patrolling the waters off our cliffs and beaches, I realized he is, in a way, the ultimate lifeguard. He has, more than once, been called upon to rescue swimmers — often drunk, or just plain dumb — who have jumped in at the end of the Manhattan Beach Pier, simply because he was the only able person close enough to save them.
Perhaps more importantly, he is also a pivotal part of the effort to protect, observe, understand and, ultimately, save all the wonderful air-breathing creatures that have lived in our neighborhood for millenia, but whom we seldom take the time to see.