Whales are still huge in Monterey Bay.

For the past couple of months, the whale-huggers of the Central Coast - including Nancy Black, owner of Monterey Bay Whale Watch - have been gushing over the abundance of whales feasting on the unusually hearty krill blooms staining the Bay's surface a rusty red this summer.

Here's MBWW's marine naturalist, Lori Beraha, with a single teeny krill. A single whale, however, can eat millions of these little guys in a day.

The krill brought out the whales, and the whales brought out the whale watchers, for a Thursday morning MBWW trip, leaving from the end of Fisherman's Wharf in Monterey.

Almost 70 customers packed the boat, including a vacationing British family (whose three boys hogged the money view at the bow for four hours); a retired teacher and her seasick-prone husband, in town for their 44th wedding anniversary; and a quiet birder from Santa Cruz, who trained his binoculars on a passing black-footed albatross while everyone else gasped at a breaching humpback.

Here's a lovely photo of the species, taken on a recent whale watching trip by Alison Barratt of the Monterey Bay Aquarium:

It didn't take long for us to see our first whales: a pair of humpbacks arcing gracefully through the gray water, showing off their fingerprint-unique flukes as they dove.


By the time we reached the edge of the Monterey Submarine Canyon, the sightings had multiplied. Now we were surrounded by several pods of humps and a group of playful Risso's dolphins, which splashed along next to us for several minutes.
We even caught a glimpse of the Zeus of whales: the mighty blue, the Earth's biggest animal, measuring up to 100 feet. The pair didn't do anything fancy for us, just a gentle arc, but that arc lasted astonishingly long as their enormous slender blue-gray bodies slid through the surface of the water.

Barratt snapped this photo during a recent whale watching trip. Can anyone tell me what blue whale body part this is?

Hint: it's about 10 feet long and would put John Holmes to shame. What I'd like to know is, what is it doing sticking out of the water?

My favorite moment - and MBWW's Tony Lorenz's - is when the humps started "lunge-feeding": opening their giant mouths to take gulps of the surface krill. Both blue and humps are baleen whales, which means they don't have teeth, but rather swallow big glugs of ocean and then push the saltwater out through a filtering structure that's like a sieve in their mouths, leaving them with tasty bites of krill.


Beraha's final cetacean count for the trip:
2 blue whales
42 humpbacks
80 Risso's dolphins

Lorenz (pictured below) - whose son Matteo was on hand to help out Thursday - says MBWW's three daily tours have been full to sold out lately, a trend he expects to continue as long as the whales keep on their krill binge. Blues and humpbacks tend to stick around into late fall. 375-4658, http://gowhales.com.


Bonus: Customers hungry after the voyage can snag a VIP card good for a free appetizer at the wharf's Cafe Fina, a green-certified restaurant that prides itself on ocean-friendly seafood selections.

I go for the barbecued sardines (normally $9.95) when they're in season: finger-smacking, sustainable silver slivers of the sea.

Sustainable Brands has an app for that.

The sad truth is, we're probably doomed. Our oceans are choked with plastic, our babies are little bundles of flame retardant, and a very cute grebe in Madagascar just went extinct.

But the folks at the Sustainable Brands Conference, held at the Monterey Conference Center June 7-10, were peppy anyway. There's still money to be made.

The conference has been criticized for giving green cred to some of the world's most polluting companies - like Clorox, Dow Chemical and Wal-Mart. At the same time, it assumes corporations must clean up their acts. And it inspires businessfolk (who fork out $2,300 per conference pass) to make changes that can have major global impacts.

SB10 also engages lots of little companies that are doing cool stuff.

Like Design Ecology, a Petaluma firm that installs living walls that remove volatile organic compounds from the indoor air.

And PeopleTowels, a Monterey startup that sells reusable, pocket-sized hand towels made from all-organic, Fair Trade cotton. According to the website, the average American worker uses 2,400 to 3,000 paper towels annually at the office. By switching to PeopleTowels, that same worker can save save one-quarter of a tree, conserve 250 gallons of water and reduce 23 pounds of landfill waste per year.

ECO eyewear makes shades using recycled metal and plastic, and plants a tree for every pair sold.

Even Monterey Bay Aquarium was there, giving out its Seafood Watch pocket guides. I won't be caught in a sushi joint without one.

But I can't shake my skepticism about the huge corporations. While their efforts are certainly a good thing, I don't see them trailblazing a revolutionary new breed of sustainable capitalism.

OK, so Frito-Lay's Sunchips are now sold in plant-based, compostable bags. That's an improvement over the old zombie bags, which will continue to blow around the planet, or swirl in an ocean garbage patch, for all eternity (perhaps passing through a few turtle and albatross guts along the way).

And PepsiCo, which owns Frito-Lay, is surprisingly on the right side of the climate lobby, supporting cap-and-trade and renewable energy bills. But does that make PepsiCo a "sustainable brand," considering the incalculable damage their packaging and emissions have done to the planet? Why not make all their products, from Gatorade bottles to Cheetos bags, compostable? Why not go all-organic? A single product's biodegradable snack pack will not save this spaceship.

Starbucks also tooted its green horn. Ben Packard, company VP of global responsibility,talked up the goal of making 100% of Starbucks coffee cups "reusable or recyclable" by 2015. The company produces almost 1% of the 500 billion cups used once, then thrown away, worldwide every year.

Customers are encouraged to bring in their own mugs for a dime off, Packard said. There are already front-of-store recycling centers in S.F., Seattle and (next month) New York City, soon to be followed by Chicago, Atlanta and Boston, he said. Customers can recycle their cups on the way out of the store...

...except that most people take their lattes to go. Packard admits that 80% of Starbucks cups leave the stores with their cups.

Doug Woodring of Project Kaisei, a San Francisco nonprofit working to find ways to clean up and re-use that swirling vortex of plastic litter in the ocean, wasn't super impressed by the Starbucks pledge.

“ 'Recyclable' is a very deceiving word. Just because it’s recyclable does not mean it will be recycled," he said."And to me, the paper cup is not as dangerous as the plastic lid and straw. Those are what will last 300 years."