As our boat lurches into motion under a steel wool gray sky, my hat flies off and vanishes into the churning water below. The Santa Cruz harbor becomes smaller and smaller on the distant horizon, until all I can see is fog.

It’s just after dawn on a Wednesday morning in May, and our 27-foot research vessel is hurtling toward Moss Landing, a hot spot for thousands of whales and other marine life that pass through the area to migrate and feed. As we gain speed, the swell sloshes over the side of the boat, soaking my sneakers. A gust of wind howls, and I turn, teeth chattering, to one of the few passengers next to me. Her lips are starting to turn blue, but she gives me a knowing smile and offers up another jacket from her backpack. I gratefully accept the silent gesture — the roar of the engines is so deafening that any attempt at making conversation is useless. 

Instead, we wordlessly scan the horizon for signs of life — a puff of discolored air or a dorsal fin peeking above the water. The minutes pass into hours as the swell rises and falls like craggy rock formations, lulling me into a meditative state. But the man at the helm, Ari Friedlaender, is on high alert. 

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Ari Friedlaender and Logan Pallin out on the water. 

With a ball cap and sunglasses shielding his bearded face, and a pair of flip-flops on his feet, the world-renowned ecologist and professor behind UC Santa Cruz’s Friedlaender Lab seems unfazed by the elements. When we slow to a stop to listen for the massive marine mammals’ distant blow — it’s too misty to see — he informs us that we’re only about 7 miles from the coastline.

“You could swim it if you really had to,” he says with a grin.

We take off again. The farther we distance ourselves from civilization, nearing the deep underwater Monterey Canyon, the more this strange world around us begins to reveal itself. Cormorants dive for breakfast, fish wiggling in their hooked beaks. Thousands of velella vellela drift along the surface of the water, far from the beaches where I’ve seen them wash up. An unbothered sea otter drifts by; clusters of sea lions swim together in perfect sync. We gasp when a dark, shiny head emerges for a moment, only to realize it’s a harbor porpoise. But seconds later, one of our passengers cries out. 

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“What is that?” 

Logan Pallin retrieves a stainless steel biopsy punch from his kit.

Before anyone can answer, the gentle giant springs up no more than 10 feet away: a lone humpback whale, so close that we can see the barnacles clinging to its skin. Friedlaender signals for his fellow researcher, Logan Pallin, to retrieve a crossbow-like device from his waterproof kit. It’s loaded with a stainless steel biopsy punch resembling a hollow metal pen cap.

Moving quickly, Pallin explains that the tool is used for collecting skin and blubber samples from the animal, which the duo can take back to the lab to glean more information about its genetics, diet and what kind of chemicals it’s been exposed to in the water. (As Friedlaender puts it: It’s the same amount of information you’d get from a blood test at the doctor’s office.)

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Pallin aims toward the whale, but it’s gone in a flash. We wait for it to return — if an animal seems evasive, the researchers avoid chasing it down so as not to stress it out further — but the surface of the water remains undisturbed. “This one’s playing hard to get,” Friedlaender says with a shrug. The engines fire up again, and we make our way back toward land.  

It was the only whale we saw that day — a testament to the long, bone-chilling hours the scientists spend out on the open water, knowing they might have only one chance to capture a fleeting glimpse of an animal for their research. It’s this undercurrent of sheer luck that has defined Friedlaender’s career. He said his lab is currently focusing on what the cetaceans are exposed to in the bustling, human-influenced environment of Monterey Bay, which they plan to compare to the highly secluded conditions the animals are living in near........

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