Whale Watching -- Hopefully

I had my whole family home for Christmas last year, but things have changed a bit for this year and I will spend Christmas in California in 2011. 

Several years ago, we took a cruise to the Channel Islands to watch for whales, but saw no whales, but had to settle with seeing thousands of dolphins. 

The most interesting sighting came when we were intersecting the course of a huge container ship from China and were told more than 5,000 containers were on board. 

A recent news cast showed a different use for these same containers as they were being loaded with huge bales of alfalfa to be hauled back to China for cattle feed.  This at the same time I read of shortage of hay in this country, due to a huge drought in Texas, which has drawn all the excess hay from Colorado. Now the good sale price for delivery to China has run the price for California Dairy Farmers feed costs up to where they will be forced to reduce the herds there and cause a shortfall in our milk supply here. 

This is a little amazing in that this is the first year in 65 years that I did not produce hay, and hay has become like all commodities in short supply resulting in higher prices. 

At least I did not have to worry about getting it cut and baled, and picked up as I experienced in that 64-year period. But now those fields have grown up in trees and that is probably healthy for the area. 

So I guess a trip to maybe see some whales would be a good side to the California trip.