The Pt. Sur, a 60-foot research vessel chartered out of Monterey's commercial harbor by Shearwater Journeys, slipped its lines at 6:45 a.m. on the second Saturday in December and rounded the breakwater into a four-foot southwest swell.
Forty-two passengers were aboard, most in heavy fleece and rubberized bibs, several already on the leeward rail with eyes on the horizon. The boat had a permit to range twenty-eight nautical miles offshore over the head of the Monterey Submarine Canyon.
Debi Shearwater, who founded the pelagic operation here in 1976 and ran it for thirty-eight seasons before retiring in 2014, was not aboard, but her successor crew followed the route she established: out past Pt. Pinos, southwest to the canyon edge, then a long search arc to the south over the Soquel Canyon.
Within the first ten minutes Heermann's gulls were following the boat in small groups, dark and elegant against the wake. By 7:20 the first sooty shearwaters began to appear, low over the swell in fives and sixes, the year's youngest birds back from their southern hemisphere natal islands.
The water inshore was a milky green from a recent algal bloom. By the time the canyon edge appeared on the depth sounder, the color had shifted to the open Pacific's dark, transparent blue. The temperature gauge read fifty-four degrees Fahrenheit.
Steve Howell, on his first guiding morning of the December season, was at the bow with a hand-held radio. He called species across to the stern team, who logged them in clipboards strapped to the railing.
Northern fulmar, light morph, 9 o'clock, low. Black-footed albatross, 11 o'clock, on the water. Pink-footed shearwater, 3 o'clock. Buller's shearwater, 11 o'clock, in the chum line.
The chum, a frozen brick of fish oil and shrimp paste, had been deployed off the stern at 8:14. Within four minutes a black-footed albatross banked in from astern, dropped its feet, and settled on the slick. Two more arrived in the next quarter hour.
The black-footed albatross breeds primarily on the Northwest Hawaiian Islands and uses the California Current as foraging habitat for much of its non-breeding year. It is one of three species of albatross regularly recorded from Monterey Bay, the other two being the Laysan and, rarely, the short-tailed.
A first-year Laysan albatross arrived at 9:31, sitting briefly on the water at the chum line before lifting off to circle the boat at gunwale height. The bird's contrasting white head and dark back drew long looks. Several passengers wept quietly.
Howell called the species and added, into the radio, that the bird was almost certainly hatched on Laysan Island the previous winter. He said this matter-of-factly, the way an ornithologist names a bird's natal location when the bird's plumage gives the year away.
By 10:15 the Pt. Sur had reached the southern edge of the canyon and the captain began a long arc to the west. The wind freshened to twelve knots. The swell rose to five feet. Two passengers had been ill since 9:00 and were now horizontal on the deck under blankets.
At 10:42 a long-tailed jaeger crossed the bow, an immature, harassing a Heermann's gull. The chase ran roughly a hundred yards before the jaeger broke off, lifted, and was gone to the south.
Marius Doyle, who had flown from Dublin to make this trip and was making notes in a small green pocket book, recorded the jaeger and then sat very still for a long moment, in the way that birders do when they have just seen a bird they have wanted for a decade.
The afternoon brought the third albatross species. At 1:14 a sub-adult short-tailed albatross, a species reduced to fewer than thirty pairs by the early twentieth century plume trade, banked in from the north and made one slow pass at the chum.
The short-tailed albatross was thought functionally extinct between 1949 and 1951. Its recovery, from a single breeding population on Torishima Island, Japan, to roughly 7,000 birds today, is one of the longer-running success stories in seabird conservation.
Howell, on the radio, was uncharacteristically quiet. He gave the species and the age and then said, more softly, that he had not seen one in this water in eighteen months.
The bird made one more pass, lifted, and worked west. The boat held its course. The pink-footed shearwaters continued to come in and out of the chum line. The water stayed the cold open blue.
The Pt. Sur turned for harbor at 2:30. The wind had built to fifteen knots by then and the bow was throwing spray over the cabin. The list, by the time the boat docked at 4:50, ran to thirty-one species.
It included all three regularly occurring albatross species, four shearwater species, the long-tailed jaeger, two storm-petrels, one phalarope, and a marbled murrelet seen briefly inside the kelp line on the return.
The trip cost $215. The fuel surcharge added another twenty-eight. Several passengers, walking up the dock toward the parking lot, said almost nothing to one another.
Most pelagic days are not this day. Most produce two albatross species, no jaeger, and a passenger or two who would not repeat the experience. The point of pelagic birding, in the long run, is that one cannot tell from the dock which day it will be.
