Whale watching cruise

Humpback whales come down from the North Pacific to breed and calve off the Guerrero coast each winter, and the legal watching season runs from mid-December to about the third week of March. A local research group has photographed more than 600 individual whales here by their tail flukes, and some are the same animals seen off California in summer.

Most boats are chartered whole, from the main pier in Zihuatanejo or from the fishing village of Barra de Potosí to the south. Captains trained in safe whale watching carry a sticker on the boat and are part of a spotting network that finds whales and keeps boats from crowding them; ask for one. A bilingual naturalist from the project can join a charter with five days' notice. The shared catamaran trip leaves in the morning for three and a half hours with breakfast, binoculars and a hydrophone to listen to the whales singing.