Return to Cabo: The Whales Edition
Nearly one year to the day since an almost perfect trip to Cabo San Lucas, I was back. I would once again get to enjoy the perfect weather, walkable downtown and picture perfect sunsets. My last trip would have qualified as perfect but for one very large missing element. That would be the whales. From mid-December to mid-April, the waters around Cabo become the place to be if you are a humpback whale. In 2024, I arrived on April 17th. I was late to the party and saw zero whales.
Fast forward to 2025 when I landed on April 8th. I was one week earlier but still coming right up on closing time. Would I get luckier this time around?
I started my day by dropping in on a couple of agencies offering whale watching tours and asking about their recent success rates. Most of them were generally optimistic but at over $100 per trip, I wanted a bit more reassurance.
While I was negotiating the sunset trip, I was also asking for the latest whale reports. The reviews were coming back mixed. Some had seen a whale or two, while others told me I was once again a day late and a peso short. There was one Captain however who promised whales with an startling level of certitude. If I could get him a minimum of three people, he would charge us $25 each and we would soon be hobnobbing with humpbacks. We exchanged numbers and I set about working my people. I had barely sat down for a beer when I started getting texts from the Capt. He was on a tour and wanted to show me all the whales they were seeing. That's all the proof I needed.
Next morning, I was joined by three friends on Capt Carlos' boat. It was just us so no crowded tour boat. I'm not going to lie and say that I would be ok if we didn't see whales but at the very least, it was going to be a nice day on the water.
It was exactly that for the first half hour, when Capt Carlos pointed excitedly... at nothing. To me, it was just water but he knew better. We rushed ahead and I still saw nothing. And then this happened.
Again and again and again. I have approximately 99 videos from this afternoon and in every single one, you can hear me gasping and squealing in delight.
There is no question in my mind that Capt Carlos somehow shares DNA with these whales. It's not just his ability to find them, it is his penchant for predicting their every move. In this video, one of my friends asks him how he knows exactly what they are going to do. He responds by pointing out that the mother whale is going to bring her tail out of the water. A moment later, she does just that.
My friend marveled at how oceanographic societies spend a fortune on radars, drones, hydrophones, you name it yet this guy can tell you that the little whale is going to pop up to the right next Tuesday.
To say that it was a spectacular day is an understatement of whale-sized proportions. There was no possible way to top it but I could certainly try. The next morning, I text Carlos to see if he had a group that I could join. He didn't and my friends were opting for a beach day. I did the only sane thing a person in my situation could do. I went to the docks and became a tout myself. Between Carlos and I, we just needed to find two more people.
It didn't take long before we got two couples to sign up and we were back on the water. The only thing I had not seen the prior day was a whale breaching. The water was rougher on this day, which boded well for some acrobatics. Conversely, it also greatly increased the chances that I would drop my phone in the water. I was getting soaked from head to toe but maintained a death grip on my phone.
It wasn't long before we started seeing them. Due to the water conditions, we could not get as close but they were there just the same.
I was still ooh'ing and aah'ing while swallowing probably unhealthy amounts of seawater and this was before the show started in earnest. Just as Carlos predicted, a whale breached in the distance. And then another. And another. It was an aqua ballet like no other.
Between the bouncing boat, the spraying water and the increasingly slippery phone, I only captured a sliver of what we saw but damn if it wasn't majestic.
Once the time came to end our tour, Carlos dropped me off right on the beach, where my friends were sunning. It was time to celebrate a perfect weekend in Cabo, no "almost" about it.
In case anyone else happens to be in Cabo during the whale days and would like to book Carlos, the whale whisperer, I am attaching both his information and a compilation video I made from both days because once a tout, always a tout.
Comments
Post a Comment