BY LYNN GOYA PHOTOS BY ALAN GOYA
Captain Fred Benko peers at the ocean from his hilltop home in Santa Barbara, California. Much like Dr. Seuss, who famously watched and wrote about gray whales from his home in the hills of La Jolla, Benko is looking for tell-tale white plumes that signify a whale cruising below. Once a commercial fisherman in the area, he gradually abandoned fishing for whale watching as he saw cetaceans return en mass to the channel. His 75-foot tour boat, the Condor Express, is a state-of-the-art whale watching boat in what may be the world's richest whale watching area. Of the 10,000 blue whales thought to exist worldwide, about 2,000 migrate annually to the waters around the Channel Islands. It wasn't always so.