Chuck Kirman / Star file photo A blue whale dives after surfacing last summer near Santa Cruz Island. Many of the sea giants, the world's largest animal, are feeding off the county's coast, thrilling people who venture out.

Chuck Kirman / Star file photos At left, blowholes send up a spray as a blue whale exhales before diving for more krill, above. Local waters are among the best places to see the huge creatures, and boat captains and passengers say viewing has been very good this summer.

Aboard the Island Adventure near Santa Cruz Island earlier this month, thick, gray skies smudged the entire canvas in dull, making it hard at times to distinguish where clouds left off and sea began.

But the action was exciting and blue in the waters right around the Adventure, a 64-foot Island Packers catamaran out of Ventura, as the world's largest animal ever surfaced to the delight of the throngs that packed the railings.

Almost simultaneously, two, three, four and finally five blue whales broke the water's plane, some barely 20 feet from the boat, so close it was easy to imagine stepping onto one of their massive backs for a ride.

Beast met air and its double blowholes sighed mightily as they expelled water and other things, like some huge tire going flat when the pressure valve is released. Then its tail went skyward, dangling above the waterline like an exclamation point, as it readied for another dive several hundred feet down for food.

As the whale disappeared below, the crowd oohed and aahed, including a vacationing French-speaking contingent that oozed "la, la, la" with brio.

"Count yourself among the very lucky few in the world who are able to see this," Evan Waite, the boat captain, told sightseers.

Blue whales are being spotted in droves off our coast. Things are going so well that Island Packers has added trips through at least Sept. 15, and others are considering going even later.

"It's just been an incredible summer," Waite said later. "This is definitely one of our best years."

Seeing five blue whales at once that close, he said, was unusual behavior; typically, they are solitary creatures. "They must have been coming up from a healthy, healthy patch of krill," he surmised, referring to the tiny shrimplike crustaceans that make up almost their entire diet.

Of late, it's been common to see about one to two dozen blue whales or more on a single boat trip.

"It's really, really, really good right now," Mat Curto, captain of the Condor Express out of Santa Barbara, said last week. "It's back to as good as it's ever been."

So much so that he's run two trips on some days and talks of extending his whale-watching trips into October or even November, though predicting the movements of whales, especially massive ones as food-dependent as blue whales, is at best a fickle exercise.

Behemoths follow their tiny food

Earlier this summer, the action was in waters south of here down to Orange County, but that activity has since cooled, said Alisa Schulman-Janiger, a board member of the American Cetacean Society's Los Angeles chapter.

Blue whale numbers are "definitely up" off Ventura and Santa Barbara, she added; Schulman-Janiger and others saw about two dozen on a local trip last weekend.

"It's not looking like they're going to leave," Curto noted. "The krill is super thick out there."

Blue whales come here in summer months to feed on the krill that flourish en masse in the ocean; a single blue whale can eat four tons of krill a day.

A blue whale can grow to about 100 feet in length and weigh more than 100 tons; they are thought to be the largest sentient being ever.

Little about a blue whale fails to awe. Its heart has the mass of a small car and pumps an astonishing 10 tons of blood through its body; a 180-pound human might have 13 or 14 pounds of blood swimming around inside.

A child could crawl through a blue whale's aortas. A blue whale's tongue alone can weigh six tons, or about as much as an African elephant.

Even dinosaurs cower — a Tyrannosaurus rex and a brontosaurus (now often called an apatosaurus) together still don't add up to one blue whale.

"Aren't they something?" gushed Island Packers co-owner Cherryl Connally.

Species is rebounding

Blue whales are an endangered species, still in recovery more than four decades after an international whaling ban; the worldwide population is perhaps 7,000 to 10,000. But off the West Coast, where they're thought to number 2,000 to 3,000, blues are deemed a success story of sorts; marine scientists consider it a healthy, stable population and say our area is one of the best on the planet to see them.

Twenty-eight species of whales and dolphins — collectively (with porpoises) called cetaceans — have been spotted in local ocean waters.

They're part of a dazzling variety of wildlife found in the nutrient-rich Santa Barbara Channel.

On this day aboard the Island Adventure, sightings included four species of dolphins, some of which showed off their tremendous sense of echolocation as they surfed within inches of the boat's bow; California sea lions that floated the channel and rested on the rocks at Santa Cruz; California pelicans, cormorants and other seabirds; and a dead, 25-foot-long basking shark that had beached just east of Prisoners Harbor on Santa Cruz.

But the big blues clearly are the star attraction this time of year.

It's enough to make anyone go "la, la, la" — even the boat captains who've seen it all on trip after trip.

"I feel lucky to take people out there," Waite said. "I get just as excited as they do."