Each year everyone wants to know- how many whales did we see this year!?!!?

And it’s always a great question. The official tally is still coming in, (some sites can’t report daily) but within the next few days we will have all of the paperwork collected and totaled.

However, based on the sites that have been able to report, we have collectively spotted and counted over 1,300 gray whales this spring and our amazing volunteers have spoken to over 16,000 visitors from around the globe. Again, these are just the initial numbers and more are coming in each day.

That brings our Winter 2016 and Spring 2017 numbers to:

Whales: 2480+

Visitor Contacts: 31,907+

Those numbers are just fantastic. An average day of whale watching with our volunteers during whale watch week is around 206 whales spotted per day and over 2,658 people educated about gray whales each day!

But there’s more…

Many of you might have heard that we started streaming our cameras live on YouTube this past whale watch week. It’s true, we did and it was awesome! You can find the archived videos at:

https://www.youtube.com/user/OregonParks

This live feed was shared via the Oregon State Park’s Facebook page and several large media outlets also linked to our cameras. We were more popular than that poor pregnant giraffe for a while! This live camera exposed over 700,000 people worldwide to what we offer here on the Oregon coast, and has generated a huge amount of interest in the Whale Watching Spoken Here program as a whole.

You!

This program cannot happen without our amazing volunteers. Volunteers, you know who you are and I want to make sure that you know that you are very much appreciated! What you currently contribute and have contributed to this program for the last 38 years is special and it is powerful.

We can’t wait to see what the next season of whale watching has in store for us and we are up to the challenge!

Thank you again and stay in touch,

-WWSH