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 Killer Whale Quests more than expected!

Our first season of operating March 2024 we could not make it out for a single Quest. Second season in March 2025, just two Quests ran, with only one sighting Killer Whales.

March 2026 turned in awesome results, with 8 trips making it out and 7 of these had successful Killer Whale sightings! For me, this illustrates why it's important that as a passenger you don't try to "cherry pick" dates or times of year. The trips we had in March, some of them were simply in the top 10% of best encounters we have ever had. There is so much "interannual variability" in Southern California climate that we really cannot rule out any month for being an amazing time to explore the Channel Islands. And in 2026, March turned out to have spectacular encounters where in previous years we did not have that experience.

Our collaboration with the California Killer Whale Project is resulting in a fantastic trove of scientific data to better understand California Transient Killer Whale use of the Channel Islands. Here is a partial list of the individuals we saw this March!

CA27s, CA51A2s, CA140Bs, CA179, CA49B, CA10, CA23, CA216Cs, CA138s.

Quests will run until May or June. Last year we saw Killer Whales 15 trips in a row throughout the late March to early June period. We do not expect action to taper off until well into June.