Blue, White & Red Christmas
ByWarning: not for the faint of heart!
While whale watching, we got to see something really cool and extraordinary. A big heads up to our captain, the proprietor of the Monterey Bay Whale Watch Center. She turned us out further into the bay to see “something interesting” just at the time we should have been heading back to shore.
The “interesting” something was a pod of transient orcas hunting an isolated sea lion. Yes, I certainly felt sorry for the sea lion, especially when he seemed to be asking the passengers of another boat to “like, please let a brother up!”
On the other hand, the orcas worked super hard, diving in tandem to corral and attack the sea lion, hoping to score what really seemed to be a modest meal for a pod of four adults and several juveniles. Their work was beautifully, morbidly exquisite: they worked a complicated ballet that we only saw glimpses of above water, herding, circling and battering the sea lion.
There is a reason why they are known as ‘killer whales.’
In the end, the whales won, and I captured it all. Warning, not for the faint of heart, or those who hope that in this story the sea lion wins . . .
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