A summary of where we've been and where we are +"Season two" stats so far

Our first official Channel Islands Killer Whale Quest was on December 24th, 2023. Prior to this, we had operated a few "for fun" trips the previous year on 12/24/22 and 12/29/22. Those initial 2022 trips both resulted in awesome encounters which were very inspiring, leading me to begin offering this experince to our customer base starting in late 2023.

One thing we have learned is that the "season" for spotting Killer Whales consistently in the Channel Islands is not just a few weeks. It's actually at least 9 months out of the year. And so we continued our Killer Whale Quests all the way through June 2024 before taking a few months break. That first season of Dec 24 2023 through June 9th 2024 taught me a lot. We ran 31 trips for 16 sightings, a 51.6% sucess rate. This was better than I could have hoped for and I'm grateful to all the passengers who came along for the quest which supported uncovering new possibilities for whale watching in the Channel Islands.

Season two began August 28th 2024, and will run through at least mid-May 2025. Killer Whales seem to go pretty quiet along the California Coast south of San Francisco from July 1st through about August 20th. For that reason we didn't operate our first quest of "season two" until a few days after Monterey Bay had their first sighting in a while in late August.

Our August 28th trip was a smashing success with multiple families of Killer Whales hunting a huge elephant seal. And since then, the success rate has been blowing our minds. Since August 28th until this writing Dec 4th, we've operated 12 trips, with 11 of them having success at finding Killer Whales. This 91.6% success rate is showing that putting in the work is generating results. Each trip we are learning more and more about how to find these animals by building technique and accumulating data. Frankly, it wasn't on any one's radar that this many encounters would be possible. I'm proud of the perseverance we've brought and the faith the customers are extending which have generated a new whale watching opportunity that previously did not exist. We have now operated 43 Killer Whale Quests.

It's going to be a major challenge to hold down such high stats as we've been putting up this Fall. But I know with each trip we are learning how to do this better. There's no doubt that when we wrap season two in mid-2025, our success rate will be way above the 51.6% of our first 31 trips.