SoCal Whales is a daily-updated aggregator of whale and dolphin sighting reports from Southern California whale-watching operators. Every two hours during the day, an automated scraper pulls sighting counts from public trip-report pages published by Newport Whales (which includes Newport Coastal Adventure trip data), Davey's Locker, Harbor Breeze Cruises, Dana Wharf, and San Diego Whale Watch, then rebuilds the site with the latest data.
The "Good Day to Go" indicator is a composite score that combines three signals: sighting counts from recent trip reports, current wave height, and wind speed. A high score means recent trips have been productive and the sea state is comfortable — a low score means either sightings have been sparse, conditions are rough, or both.
The site has no login, no accounts, and no user-submitted reports. All data comes from publicly available operator reports and free open-data weather services from Open-Meteo. If the data looks wrong, the most likely explanation is that the source page changed its format — see the contact section below.
Built and maintained by Delegated Trust.
Sighting counts are scraped daily from each operator's public trip-report pages. No private data or APIs are used — only information already visible to the public on each operator's website.
Sighting data sources:
Weather data: Wave height, wind speed, and swell period come from the Open-Meteo marine API. Open-Meteo provides free marine forecast data with no affiliation to this site. No account or API key is required.
For full details on how data is collected and how the score is calculated, see the Methodology page.
This site is not currently affiliated with any booking platform or operator. The "Book Now" links go directly to each operator's own booking page — no commission is earned and no markup is added. If that ever changes, any affiliate links will be clearly labelled so you know.
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For questions, corrections, or to report data that looks wrong: pginfra@pm.me