Laguna Beach - Day 6 (Little Corona Del Mar Beach & Dolphin and Whale Tours) - Part 2 of 3

As we previously mentioned, we decided not to make the trek down to Sea World, but we wanted to try to fill the day with some new and exciting adventures that were close to Laguna Beach.  I was able to find a dolphin and whale tour that left from Dana Point Harbor, which was about 15 minutes south of us.  The tour was projected to last around two to three hours in total.  Unfortunately, as we learned during our honeymoon, Tara gets extremely sick on a boat and so we gave her the afternoon off while I took the boys out for the tour.  You can see our boat in the picture above.  It is the white one in the middle of the picture and held about 35 people at capacity.

The main part of the boat was solid, but the entire front end was made up of mesh ropes woven between the front edges of the boat.  This meant you could look through down to the water quite easily, but also that the water constantly splashed up on your legs while the boat was cruising.  It was actually a bit windy out on the open ocean, and with some cloud cover it made for a cooler trip.  This didn't really stop these guys from wanting to be right out over the water getting soaked with every rolling wave.

It took us about 30 minutes or so to find the first pod of dolphins of the trip.  This was a pod of about 300-400 dolphins cruising along, and the neat thing about the boat was you were able to pull right in to the center of this huge pod.  The dolphins seemed to like interacting with the boat and the people on the boat and were quite comfortable playing around right in front of the boat as you can see by the picture above.

Another neat feature of this boat was that it had a viewing cabin that went down into the hull of the boat.  It was partially submerged, and you could peer out under the water and see the dolphins at eye level.  This picture shows the boys in the viewing cabin.  We took a few turns down here because it was so cool.

This picture shows one of the many baby dolphins that were swimming around.  It was hard to get good shots of them as they are moving so fast and popping up and down all over the place.  It was pretty amazing to see the sheer number of these dolphins in the wild.  We probably spent a total of 30-45 minutes just cruising slowly along with this pod.