Whales are the new awesome

there are probably about 3 days a year that are actually beach worthy in san francisco - days where you can actually go sit in the sun and not even bring a jacket. we had a hot weekend, so just in case this was the last chance to go to the beach in 2006, i went twice!

tracy, juliann, cameron and i rolled out in style with the top down on the blue bug


how excited was cameron? pump-your-fist-up-and-down-wildly excited. (dont look at his face. just his excited fist)


Baker Beach is my favorite because you sit in the sand with the Golden Gate Bridge in the background.


All of us were happy about getting tan except for cameron. He was pretending to be han solo at that part in star wars when he gets frozen


Jeff's muscles are bigger than the Golden Gate Bridge! See how his bicep blocks the bridge out completely? For those of you that didn't know, Jeff totally made the Hot List last month.


One of the highlights was when a few dolphins swam right up to the shore and started playing in the surf. See those fins? Those are dolphins!


Wait. Let me zoom in a little closer so you can see the dolphins a little better.


It was funny because as everyone on the beach was pointing and yelling, "dolphins!" a family with three small children on the blanket nearest mine started yelling, "whales!" At first I looked toward the ocean a little harder, trying to see the whales they were referring to. Then I realized that in fact, they were talking about the dolphins, just misnaming them. The youngest of the children piped up, asking if he could go closer and look at the whales, but the dad very seriously told him that whales kill people, and that he should never get too close.

I had to bite my tongue. Part of me felt it my civic duty to make sure that those kids were not being led astray. I wanted to yell over to their blanket that those animals swimming in the ocean right in front of us were not whales, but dolphins (or maybe porpoises) - aquatic mammals certainly related to whales, but also famous for their willingness to occasionally approach humans and playfully interact with them in the water! Hadn't this family heard all the stories of dolphins protecting shipwrecked sailors against sharks by swimming circles around the swimmers? Had they never heard of Flipper? Even if I thought that the father was making some sort of joke, we all know that such humor would have been lost on a three year old. I am pretty sure he was giving information that he thought to be accurate. In the end, I decided not to say anything, even though I worried about the repercussions of this misinformation - would these children embarrass themselves in school sometime because of this? Will they experience some heartbreaking moment where they lose trust in their father when they realize that he doesn't know everything?

I made myself feel better by coming home and reading about dolphin/whale attacks on humans, conceding that in fact those wild cetaceans could be potentially dangerous after all. Also, apparently there is a big debate in some circles about whether dolphins really are whales - it is just a matter of semantics according to some science people that apparently know. So maybe it is a good thing that I didn't bring it up with the family, because maybe the dad was one of those science guys that would have given me a science lecture and humiliated me on the beach.

But I am still pretty sure that those were dolphins.