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Santa Barbara’s Condor Express leads the way in responsible whale watching with fuel-efficient engines and quieter, safer propulsion technology.
A blue whale is one of the loudest animals on the planet, producing calls up to about 180 decibels underwater. Many of its calls are extremely low-frequency, around 10 to 40 Hz, making them difficult or impossible for humans to hear without equipment.
They also specialize in low-frequency hearing, and scientists think they hear best in roughly the same range as their calls — which overlaps with the frequencies produced by large ships. Researchers worry that ship noise can mask whale communication and may reduce their ability to detect or respond to approaching vessels, contributing to deadly ship strikes.
“They don’t hear the way we do,” says Austin MacRae, a naturalist who’s been volunteering with the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary for 11 years. “So the ships just aren’t registering for them.”
Santa Barbara’s Condor Express has found one solution to this problem: using updated technology that allows humans to get close to wildlife without disrupting their natural rhythms or putting them in danger.
The Santa Barbara Channel is one of only two Whale Heritage Areas in the United States. Tens of thousands of Pacific gray whales migrate through the channel annually on their round trip between Alaska and Baja California. Humpbacks gather in the channel from spring through fall to feed on anchovies and other bait fish, while blue whales arrive in summer to hunt krill along the Channel Islands drop-offs. At times, as many as 50,000 dolphins may be in the channel. It is one of the most biologically productive marine ecosystems on Earth, and also one where boat traffic can have serious consequences for marine life.
Condor Express has been running whale-watching tours out of Santa Barbara since 1973. The 75-foot catamaran the company currently uses, which was first launched in 2002, was purpose-built to address that problem. Founder Fred Benko was a fisherman who had spent years watching whale migrations along this coastline. He had been running whale watches on an earlier vessel, and he did not like what conventional propellers meant for the animals.
So he traveled to New Zealand and commissioned a purpose-built design that the company uses today. It remains the only waterjet-driven whale-watching vessel on the West Coast.
The difference plays out below the waterline in two ways. Conventional propellers generate cavitation noise, the implosion of bubbles created by spinning blades under pressure, which is one of the primary sources of underwater sound from tour and recreational vessels.
The Condor Express uses HamiltonJet waterjet propulsion. Water is drawn in and expelled in a directed stream. There is no exposed shaft and no spinning blade. Cavitation is internalized, significantly dampening the noise it produces. There is also nothing to strike an animal that surfaces near the hull.
Four 700-horsepower Scania diesel engines, which replaced the original Detroit Diesels in 2020, power the system. They run cleaner and more fuel-efficiently than their replacements, which means less combustion noise enters the water column.
The behavioral evidence is hard to argue with. On the day I was aboard, around 1,500 dolphins surrounded the boat — under it, in front of it, and alongside it — including mothers with calves playing in the bow wake. We spotted three humpbacks, including a mother and calf near the edge of the shipping lanes that repeatedly approached the vessel on their own. The whales came to us.
Jean-Michel Cousteau, son of the legendary ocean explorer Jacques Cousteau, is a regular on the boat. McCrae, who has been aboard with him, says Cousteau has told the crew that all whale-watching boats should be designed and built like the Condor Express.
It is worth acknowledging that whale-watching operators are not the greatest threat these animals face in the channel. Commercial shipping generates far more acoustic and collision risk than tour boats.
The Protecting Blue Whales and Blue Skies program, a multi-partner initiative involving NOAA’s Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary, the Santa Barbara and Ventura County Air Pollution Control Districts, the Environmental Defense Center, and the California Marine Sanctuary Foundation, asks large commercial vessels to slow to 10 knots as they transit the channel. In 2021, NOAA reported that speed reductions contributed to a 50% reduction in whale strikes.
I have been whale watching all over North America and Australia, and I have never felt as I did when I stepped off the Condor Express. I had watched extraordinary animals up close, and I did not feel like I had stressed them out or intruded on anything. It felt less like a tour and more like we had been allowed to look in on their world for a few hours without changing it. That is what happens when a tour operator gets it right.
What You Can Do
Before booking a whale watch tour, ask:
- Whether the vessel carries trained naturalists.
- What propulsion system it uses.
- Whether the company holds any recognized conservation designation.
- Whether they use sonar to locate marine life (Condor Express does not).
- What the protocol is when whales are spotted nursing or feeding (responsible tour operators maintain a strict distance).
- How they minimize their impact on the animals.
Great, innovative idea…and it looks like most other whale watch vessels. On the East Coast of the U.S. and in Alaska, many whale watch operators voluntarily participate in https://whalesense.org/ which promotes responsible operation of WW vessels. Their participation gets promoted and recognized through the Whale SENSE program. Naturalists and captains go through an on-line training course. None of these vessels, as far as we have seen, have propellers.