Channel Islands Trip Reports | Pacific Offshore Exp

Trip Reports and Sightings from Channel Islands

March 2026 Killer Whale Reports

Underwater photo taken by passenger Hongming Zheng on our March 20th trip. The ocean that day was so calm the surface reflected the orca perfectly! Plus very blue water... a rare set up in the Channel Islands!! Awesome shot Mr. Zheng. March is usually our windiest month. However, if you live in southern California you might have noticed something unusual about March 2026. It was much warmer than normal, and with that brought weather conditions that allowed us to operate Kille

February 2026 Reports and Updates

Photo by Capt. Ryan from our 2/28 Quest. February is the dead of winter and there are many Killer Whales around! It's just a question of whether we can GET to them. And this past month there was challenges surrounding that. To be honest, it was a bit demoralizing for both our crew and customers Feburary 2026. As you may know, our Quests are scheduled for every week Friday through Sunday. That gave us 12 scheduled Killer Whale trips for this month. How many of those were cance

January 2026 Summary

The past month we have enjoyed incredibly stable weather which leant itself to off the charts Killer Whale encounters! Normally a winter month like January has several storm systems roll through and disrupt our schedule. But Jan 9th through 31st we didn't have to cancel a single trip due to weather. In that time span, we operated 16 quests and sighted Killer Whales on 15 of them! On one particular day, 40 Killer Whales were seen. You may be wondering... is this the peak? What

December Schedule Discussion

Many folks are inquiring.... "What about trips during the Christmas Season?!" In years past, we have operated Killer Whale Quests with good success in the time immediatley before and after Christmas. This year, we do not have any trips on our calendar in the time frame. The reason why is that our schedule in Newport Beach is very much full, day and night, for 2 hour trips during this time. If we have Oxnard commitments on top of this, it's a big stressor to our scheduling. On