Team I left Moss Landing harbor around 0930 hrs. Team member split up into two groups, one on board of R/V Astirix and the other on board of R/V Mavrix. The two vessels and the crew are from the Pelagic Shark Research Foundation, our collaborating organization. They study sharks, the dolphins and sea otters top predators. An unlikely combination but it really works out well.

Since it was our first day on the water, we decided to stay together and spend some time training everybody on the proper way to collect the data. The weather was incredible, sunny and crisp with Beufort 0 sea state, no clouds or swells. We cruised northward, along the Monterey Bay shoreline. The water was teeming with birds, mostly pelicans, sooty shearwaters, terns, cormorants and seagulls. There were areas of high abundance of baitfish at the surface and the water was the typical brown-green of the "upwelling" period, signalling healthy plumes of productivity in the bay.

Conditions like this are unusual at this time of the year, when the fog is thick in the morning and the wind kicks-in in the afternoon. Definitely not today.....Harbor porpoises, generally so hard to spot in windy conditions were all over the nearshore, moving in and off shore while foraging.

We found the bottlenose dolphins at Rio del Mar, just in front of a kayaker who was delighted to be the center of the school's attention. The animals were swimming spread out in a lime about 800 m long. Some travelled in the surfline, others slightly offshore. Groups of dolphins within the same school coalesced and dispersed continuously and it was difficult to keep track of individual animals. There were 15 adults and no calves and we photo-identified at least six individuals with distinct markings.

On the way back to Moss Landing we travelled offshore and we came across two humpback whales, mother and juvenile, foraging in a large circle along theMonterey Bay submarine canyon's edge. What a perfect first day for the Team!