SoCal Whales aggregates whale and dolphin sighting reports from Southern California whale-watching operators. Every two hours during scheduled daytime Pacific runs, an automated scraper checks public trip-report pages published by Newport Whales, Davey's Locker, Harbor Breeze Cruises, Dana Wharf, and San Diego Whale Watch.
Scraping and publishing are two different clocks. The scraper runs every two hours during its scheduled windows; the published pages are rebuilt on a daily schedule. A change in counts can trigger an additional build, but the page does not update until that build and deployment finish. The source footer names the operator report date, the scrape represented by the page, and the page build time separately. If a timestamp is unavailable, it says so rather than estimating freshness.
The Good Day to Go score is a 0-10 scale estimate of comfort for offshore whale-watching boat trips. It starts at 10, subtracts forecast penalties for wind, waves, visibility, thunderstorms, and rain, adds one point when a rare species is present in the currently aggregated sighting data, and then clamps the result to 0-10. Sighting counts do not affect it, and it does not predict whether whales will be seen.
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 every two hours during daytime Pacific hours from each operator's public trip-report pages, with one further pass in the late afternoon — six a day. No private data or APIs are used — only information already visible to the public on each operator's website.
Five pages are scraped, but they carry four independent feeds across four harbours. Newport Whales and Davey's Locker are affiliated sites publishing the same trip-report data, so their rows are reconciled rather than added together — two mirrored pages reporting one pod is not two sightings.
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.
These operators are not the only ones running trips from these harbours — they are the ones whose public trip reports can be scraped. See Methodology for what that inclusion criterion means, and for a safety-relevant distinction between a licensed captain and an inspected vessel worth knowing before you book.
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: [email protected]