SoCal Whales is a daily-updated aggregator of whale and dolphin sighting reports from Southern California whale-watching operators. Every day, an automated scraper pulls sighting counts from public trip-report pages published by Newport Coastal Adventure, Davey's Locker, Newport Whales, and other local operators, 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 the last 48 hours, 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. If the data looks wrong, the most likely explanation is that the source page changed its format — see the contact section below.
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.com). 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.
Affiliate registration with Viator and GetYourGuide is pending — the booking links on this site are not currently tracked affiliate links and no commission is earned at this time. Once registration is complete, booking a tour through a link on this site may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. This will not affect which operators are listed or how they are ranked — operators appear based on their public sighting data, not commercial arrangements. See our full affiliate disclosure for complete details.
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For questions, corrections, or to report data that looks wrong: [email protected]