I always tell guests, whale watching is never going to be the same after you've come to San Ignacio. For the majority of the planet, whale watching is you go out on a big boat with many people, and you'll see something far away. You'll see a fluke. You'll see a spout. Maybe you'll see something breaching. For a lot of our guests, that is what they've known, but they are trying to experience something something more. Instead of seeing them at the distance, they want to get closer to these animals. With the gray whales, you go to this particular place and you see it all. They don't make it hard. Like, they are the ones that are allowing us to see them up close. I think we are very lucky that they show us essentially what is to be a whale, and that doesn't happen anywhere else. Actually, what we just think that happens when they, you know, when they reach their feeding grounds is, like, the calf is like, "I'm out, mom!" It's more like probably the calf saying, "Bye! I want to be independent. I'm eighteen, I'm going out..." For some reason, I've always been, like, obsessed with dolphins and whales since I can remember. And the thing is that I always knew that I was going to live, like, in well, not in the ocean, right? But just close, like, as close as I could be. I always knew that. And I want to be near whales. My uncle is a biologist, and he's the one that told me there's this thing called marine biology. But I was young, and I think just because it had the word marine, I was, like, hooked. Whales and dolphins live in the ocean, so I guess that is the thing that I'm going to do. I studied marine biology, and I studied acoustics of blue whales here in Loreto. Right after university, I needed to move away a little bit. It was, like, professionally and personally, I was going through a lot of different things. I landed in San Ignacio, and San Ignacio offered me other doors. When the opportunity came to work for the first time in Whale Camp, I know it's a place that I really liked when I went there as a student. So I was like, let's just go and you're going to like it and you need the time to think about what am I going to do with my life. What's the next step? I was whale watching every single day, seeing the gray whales every single day, having people come in and seeing them experience the gray whales for four months straight. I was like, what other place that I haven't found can give me that? I never thought that was a job, and the lagoon and Whale Camp basically showed that to me. Slow mo. Wow! San Ignacio Lagoon is a closed, shallow, protected place for the gray whales to be able to do the most important things in their life cycle; to mate and to give birth. They are so comfortable in these lagoons that they are just being themselves. They are relaxed. We see them floating in the surface. They are taking a nap. It's like a safe place for them. It's so special that they are allowing the most intimate moment of their lives, that is when you have a newborn, to have us near them. In the same place that we now go and have all of these amazing encounters, the whales were hunted there. The whalers, they would go straight for moms and calves because the calf is an easy prey. The calf doesn't have any blubber, so you don't have an interest in getting the calf. It's the female that is large and well fed with a lot of blubber that they were interested in. But if you get rid of the calf, then it's going to be an easier catch. But of course, the female would defend the calf from the whalers, and they would smack boats down and break them apart. And that's why the whalers gave them that nickname of devil fish. It's crazy because the same place where they were hunted, now we go and we splash to them. So a friendly whale shows up. Sometimes they do a bubble burst, like, very close to the boat. I tell guests, this is a friendly one. They're letting you know that I'm being friendly right now. You splash water to them. They are very tactile animals. And sometimes if you don't splash to the whale, they go to another boat. And that boat is splashing to them, and they stay at that boat. Some just go and stay right next to the boat, feeling it even, you know, going underneath the boat. We just all roll to one side because that's where the mom or calf is, and then they come to the other side, and then we go to the other side of the boat. I always say, who's playing with whom? Is it us with them or they with us? For a lot of our guests, they're just shocked. And I think the shock comes with excitement, with joy. It's like an overjoy. People get ecstatic. You know? Like, they have so much energy. You feel, like, that energy from this exchange that is happening. They went from what the whalers called the devil fish to a friendly whale. It's a reminder, I think, now, of what it was in the past, and I think of what we don't want it to be. The value of having whales has changed. I remember that field trip when I was in college, experiencing San Ignacio, and the whales for the first time. When I have experiences like that, just in general in life, I write things down, just like, to process things better. Years later, I found this note that I wrote when I was on this field trip saying, one day I'm going to come back to San Ignacio and I'm going to work here with the gray whales. For me, every trip that I go back, no matter if it's the first trip of the season or the last trip of the season, just like the gray whales, it's a place that I that I feel very comfortable. That I– it's just – I feel like me. For me, it's that, like, the place gives me more than I give. And now I get to go back every single year. It's just the sum of everything, no? It's like a dream. I think now the the cool thing is to to share it.
