Gray Whales & Conservation on SeaLegacy | The Voyage

Buenos dias equipo. Spanish is coming along. I am actually cracking out full sentences. I want a liquid breakfast with strawberries and protein, please. Big. Black. I have made little cards. I've given lessons. I have tried. And I feel like it's not yet coming together. I'm learning slowly to speak a little bit of Spanish, so it's kind of fun. Paul and I have been together for 12 years now, so he better get on it. We are on the west coast of the Baja Peninsula in a beautiful place called the Laguna Ojo de Liebre, which means the Eye of the Hare. What we're doing is we're going to go out with the fishermen that have transferred their skill set from fishing to taking tourists out to spend time with the amazing gray whales. Here we go. Day one. All the big males have started leaving the lagoon. That means that what we will be seeing today is just the mothers and the calves. And they say that the calves are really playful. You just sit there patiently with a good attitude and the whale will come. Many times the mother will show the calf the contact with humans. And sometimes you can stay half an hour just petting whales. And nothing prepares you for the moment when one of these whales just pops right next to your boat and wants to be touched. They want to be caressed. They want to be kissed. They want to be interacting with humans. And it is just awesome. Every single gray whale that we see along the coast of the Pacific was born in these lagoons. They're all Mexican. They come here to mate, they leave, and then they come back the next year to have their babies here. The mothers teach the babies that humans are okay. And so you have these generation after generation of gray whales learning that boats have people. And people are fun. They want to touch them, they want to spend time with them, and they're super sociable. When a mother and a calf gray whale come directly over to your boat and start to push your boat around and they start to rise up and you're looking into their eye, and what they want is a head rub or a back rub or a lip rub, you put your cameras down and you instantly have this deep connection with this animal where you're staring into its eye and you're just rubbing, feeling the texture of the skin and having this interaction. And the mother and her baby fighting for your affection really just grabs you by the heart. It's extremely powerful. Fishermen, they really make an effort for conservation because they cannot fish inside the lagoons when the whales come. So these guys are really the ones that have been putting an effort and money into conservation of whales. So a way to pay them back is to make these socially responsible, environmentally responsible tourism operations that have a way of guaranteeing a way of life for these communities. It's a tête-à-tête. They put a little and they get a little. It's a very good example of how this can be done the right way. We had a great shoot. We got the images we wanted. We've arrived back in La Paz. We're unpacking. And now here's a voice I haven't heard in a long time. Sea Legacy One, Sea Legacy One, this is Andy, do you copy?