Debi Shearwater

DEBI SHEARWATER is the founder, owner and operator of Shearwater Journeys. She takes people from all over the world on trips out on Monterey Bay to see birds and other marine life. Debi has taught bird watchers that if whales are feeding, birds are probably near by, and it’s worth looking at everything that is out there. Her trips include Half Moon Bay and the Farallon Islands off San Francisco Bay, but over the years she’s led trips all up and down the California coast. She also leads expedition voyages at sea, including the Galapagos, Antarctica, South Georgia, the Falklands, Svalbard and the Russian far east.

Debi says she’s witnessed the comeback of the great whales in Monterey Bay since the ‘70s, but is now seeing the same thing happening off the coast of Russia in the Western Pacific, where she’s seen blue whales, fin whales, humpbacks, minkes, grays and even a North Pacific right whale.

Debi was born and grew up in Brookhaven, Pennsylvania and left when she was eighteen, because she married an Army Officer. She and her husband lived in quite a number of places, mostly in the south, including Alabama, Georgia, Virginia and Texas. Then he got orders to come to the Navel Post Graduate School in Monterey. Debi came kicking and screaming all the way, as she did not want to come to California: too many people and too many cars!

Debi’s path into bird watching was fortuitous. While her husband was in Vietnam, her little brother found a baby bird. Not only did it not die, but Debi raised it and the female house sparrow became her pet bird. Debi’s husband sent her a pair of binoculars from Vietnam, and she began to look at the birds in her backyard.

Debi then bought the book How to Watch Birds by Roger Barton. In it he suggested joining the Audubon Society. At the time, Debi was still in Pennsylvania, but soon moved to Fort Hood in Texas. She didn’t know anyone in the small town they lived in, so she got a Roger Tory Peterson Field Guide for Texas, but couldn’t figure the birds out on her own. She decided to join the Audubon Society, but the nearest branch was 70 miles away in Austin.

Debi managed to join one of their field trips, and was mesmerized by the twelve bird watchers, all looking through their binoculars. There she met her birding mentor who told her about a woman named Connie Hagar, who lived in Rockport, Texas. Connie walked the same route every day and found all kinds of birds that people knew nothing about. It planted a seed in Debi’s mind and she thought, someday she’d find her own place and walk the same route over and over and over.

After Texas, but before Monterey, Debi and her husband moved to Virginia. The field guide for the area was full of shearwaters, and Debi decided she needed to see some. She went on her first pelagic trip while on the east coast. There she met a birder who lived in Monterey. She told him how disappointed she was in having to move to Monterey, and he told her if she liked sea birds, she’d love it.

Debi recounts that when you’re in the military you generally know you’ll be somewhere for a set amount of time.  She and her husband came to Monterey and were only going to be there for 18 months. The plan was to see everything they could see and do everything they could do in those 18 months.

Debi was now a birdwatcher so she went out on a National Audubon bird trip on the Bay and was hooked. It was 1976. The Monterey harbor was covered with fulmars, which sold her. Only later did she learn how rare that was. On her second trip that Fall, she hoped to see a whale. There was little written about them back then, and, low, they saw a blue whale!

Debi then organized her own trip with the Santa Cruz Bird Club charging $13 for a 7 1/2 hour trip. On her first outing they saw a special Japanese shearwater, the streaked shearwater, and that bird triggered her to start leading regular bird trips. However, she says the birds wouldn’t have sustained her; it was the marine mammals.

About then in 1977, she decided that maybe Monterey wasn’t so bad after all.  But her job as a military wife was to support her husband, which wasn’t what she had in mind, so she got divorced.

Debi then began putting together more and more trips. She ran eight the first year, and her top year she ran 80 trips.

According to Debi, the mid-1980s were like heaven on earth out in Monterey Bay. Twenty blue whales stationed themselves in the Bay in 1985. They were out there feeding, but hung around so long, folks began to think maybe it was their breeding grounds as well. There were also lots of humpbacks, and they also regularly saw leatherback turtles.

There were no whale watch boats back then, just Debi’s bird and marine mammal trips. She recalls that she was the first to see Cuvier’s beaked whales, and first to see killer whales making a gray whale kill. Many birders on her trips would get pissed, as Debi insisted on staying with the whales, but there was a method to her madness. They saw a lot of firsts, birds as well as whales. Like Connie Hagar, Debi’s been traveling the Bay over and over and making new discoveries along the way.