Farallon Islands

Inside the 'kill zone': A surprise encounter at San Francisco's Farallon Islands

A thrilling trip to the city's remote set of islands

By David Curran

The waters were calm as we stood on the deck of the Salty Lady, idling less than 100 yards off the Farallon Islands. About 30 of us passengers were on the 56-foot vessel. I was near the bow as our naturalist, Michael Pierson, calmly described this marine refuge, explaining its cave systems and showing us a favorite sea lion resting spot.

Then, out of nowhere, Pierson’s voice rose in excitement.

“That’s a great white shark!” he howled. “There! Right there!”

I looked straight down into the water and saw it, that mysterious creature that fills us with fear and fascination. It was a few feet beneath the surface and about 11 feet long. It didn’t look quite as terrifying as the impossibly huge creature I’d imagined from seeing “Jaws,” but as it sliced through the water, it was an unforgettable sight.

After the shark vanished into the murky waters, Pierson quickly waved to the Farallones shark researchers in a small boat nearby. They had a GoPro rigged to a pole, as they were on a quest to track sharks that afternoon.

“Over here!” he yelled to the researchers, pointing directly beneath our boat.

“That”’ he said to the group, “is a great sighting.”

More an unexpected one. After all, this excursion was billed by the Oceanic Society as a whale-watching tour to the Farallones. As we passengers quickly found out, this nearly eight-hour day trip would include whales plus much more.

Initially, the prospect of seeing the Farallones up close made the journey enticing. For years, glimpsing those tiny islands, whether from somewhere in San Francisco or coming over Mount Tamalpais toward the ocean, was always a thrill. Often, they would appear for only minutes at a time before vanishing in a haze.

While dozens had signed up for the trip — and paid the slightly eye-popping fee of $300 — we had many different agendas. As expected, our group included veteran whale watchers, like one woman who had just returned from Alaska on one of her many cetacean junkets. And one enthusiast got so excited when a humpback emerged from the water, he began chanting, “Fluke! Fluke! Fluke!” like he was cheering at a keg party.

But some were looking for other diversions. A Dallas mom told me her family had signed on to get their teenagers off the screens for a day. So, for them, this was a day of escaping the evils of electronics. For a mere $1,200.

We had time to hear a little about other people’s lives on the Salty Lady because the Farallones are way the hell out there even though, oddly, they are technically part of San Francisco. Call them the outer, outer, outer Sunset. After leaving Sausalito and passing under the Golden Gate, we spent nearly two hours making the 27-mile journey.

Passengers might chat about where they are from or how much Dramamine they took — or how much they wish they’d taken. I was seated on the less chilly back of the boat near Susan Sherman, our other naturalist — yes, $300 gets you two naturalists — and she was always eager to engage.

A guide on Oceanic Society tours since the early 1990s, Sherman fashioned a pretty idyllic life for herself, working on these boats in the Bay Area but also on natural history boat tours in the Galapagos, Sri Lanka, Alaska and other far-flung places. 

Her enthusiasm does not seem to have dimmed a bit. She was often dipping into her box of educational tools to find a geologic map of the Farallones, a whale chart or even bits of baleen for us to run fingers through and imagine what it’s like to be a little krill that’s doomed to become a whale’s lunch.

Humpback heaven

A bit after 10 a.m., our boat’s captain, Jared Davis, noticed a bunch of seabirds gathered in a seemingly random patch of ocean. He explained this was a clear indicator some kind of bait fish were nearby, probably anchovies. And this meant the likelihood of, yes, whales.

He was right. At 10:07 a.m., less than two hours after leaving the dock in Sausalito, our first humpback appeared.

Everyone was soon on high alert as whales kept appearing. Someone on board would yell out a sighting, and then people would scurry left, right, front or back with cameras poised. (This was despite the fact that the organizers pledged to send us the wildlife photos that Pierson, a skilled photographer, took.)

At this point, they were all humpbacks. In our final tally, we saw 20. Sometimes, we would just see mist popping out of a blowhole; often, a bit of the whale’s back would break the surface and then quickly vanish. At times, whales would appear on both sides of the boat, and we’d have to pick a side, possibly missing out on something amazing.

 

And then there were those 5-star moments, such as when the captain yelled, “That’s a full breach!”

This is when the whale comes at least halfway out of the water, as featured on the cover of any whale-watching brochure. And for good reason: It is super cool. Or so I hear, since when the whale breached on my tour, I was staring down at my seized-up phone camera.

 

Mercifully, my phone died fairly early on in the day, and I could just enjoy the experience. This included one highlight as a pair of humpbacks engaged our boat in what our guides termed a “friendly encounter.”

Sherman explained they were quite possibly a mother and her calf, since they can stay together for up to six years. This engagement with the boat continued for several minutes: swimming beside us, coming in very close and, at times, appearing like they may swim under the vessel.

Farallones, ahoy

As we approached the Farallones, a group of sea lions were hightailing it through the water. Pierson explained they were hurrying because they were on the edge of the “kill zone,” where a great white could attack a pinniped at any time, especially since we were in the prime season for shark attacks.

This last notion was confirmed when Pierson checked in by walkie-talkie with the biologists living on the Farallones. They let him know there had been six great white attacks, or “predations,” on local wildlife in the past five days. 

We boated around these barren, rocky islands, taking in the famed devil’s teeth and then coming around to an area called Mirounga Bay, where a large colony of fur seals was growling and bleating. Among the seals were large sea lions galumphing this way and that. I saw birds everywhere, as this national wildlife refuge is home to over 160 avian species jammed onto a fairly small mass of land.

 

We passed the three buildings where the biologists live and work. They had better love their job out here because there is literally nothing else. And then, our boat idled just to the east of them, not far from the island’s boat launch. This is where we had our fleeting but unforgettable encounter, the moment when, with no phone to distract, I could witness the great white, the apex predator, in its element.

Blue whales, Blue Angels

Departing the Farallones, the Salty Lady did not head east and back toward the Golden Gate. Instead, Davis decided we would travel the 4 miles or so west to reach the continental shelf. One minute, we were at 400 feet in depth; the next we were at 1,000. Then we were at 3,000 feet. 

“This is where the real adventure is for the guides,” Sherman later told me. “We don’t know what we’re going to see out there.”

In the past, she said, sightings included some much rarer species, including beak whales and even a sperm whale. 

While neither of these species showed up on this trip, blue whales did, and they were gigantic. All told, we saw three of them, estimated by our guides to be somewhere between 70 and 80 feet in length. The humpbacks we had seen measured half the size.

To cap this day of sensory delight, we entered San Francisco Bay — unwittingly just in time to take in the Blue Angels air show, which was mesmerizing in its own ear-splitting, boat-buzzing way.

But the memory of all the aeronautic razzle-dazzle came and went at almost supersonic speed. What remains from that day are three blue whales, 20 humpbacks, a Farallones feast of birds and seals and sea lions and, of course, a great white sighting that passed in a flash but continues to linger, as vividly as that brief moment in the kill zone.