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As Captain Dan Salas went out to sea, the tide calmed.
It started as an ordinary morning in April 2004 for Leslas, who four years ago brought Long Beach Harbor Breeze Cruises to Long Beach and regularly takes tourists to see the dolphins and gray whales that swim in the nearby waters.
But suddenly a huge body rose out of the water in the distance. Waves of white foam crashed where it lay.
The creature was much larger than anything Sala had seen before.
Saw a blue whale. The enormity impressed him.
Salas told the Business Journal he doesn’t know exactly why the whales started showing up in the Long Beach area. But he knew he had to see more.
“I don’t know what happened. It was some kind of climate change or current change or something,” Salas recalled. But “I was very inspired by the blue whale.”
That day, Salas saw his first blue whale, and he and his whale-watching clients ventured 20 miles out to where the creature had surfaced for a closer look.
But, it turns out, regularly offering trips to see blue whales wasn’t true.
“It took three, three and a half hours to go out to the whales and back,” Salas said. “If we find a whale, we can only spend about 10 minutes, even if we’re lucky, they’re that far away.”
The giants were farther from land than the dolphins and gray whales on which Salas had built his business, and the boats did not have the speed to make the long journey.
“If you have a 10-knot boat and you want to go 20 miles, it will take you about two hours to get there,” Salas said. “Sometimes it’s the journey [around] For four hours the men grumbled a little on the boat.
Still, he was motivated to focus more on tracking the blue whale.
So, he decided to find a boat that would do the job. The next year, he arranged to buy a $1 million state-of-the-art yacht, and in 2005, On the Fourth of July he began his first official blue whale chase.
It was an amazing success.
“We saw blue whales that day,” Salas said. “We’re starting to get media attention. We’re focusing on blue whales in Long Beach.
Today, Salas operates two cruises out of Long Beach as part of his business, offering both whale-watching tours and informative cruises based out of the Aquarium of the Pacific. Large, multi-hull boats designed to minimize turbulence on the water, these catamarans are ideal for the sailing business.
Both can hit a top speed of 30 knots (more than 34.5 miles per hour), which is fast enough to find blue whales without sacrificing customer satisfaction – an important task that La Espada, now the flagship of the fleet, can agree on. 250 passengers per trip.
Salas’ informative tours, meanwhile, are 45-minute cruises around Long Beach Harbor where passengers learn about the history of the waters around Long Beach, from the oil islands to the naval activities that have passed through the harbor. These can go in some of the older small boats they have in the Sala Nine fleet.
But there are two distinct seasons for whale watching. The first is the more traditional gray whale season, which runs from November to April. Salas started the winter season after Christmas, but things changed when the blue whale began to appear.
The elusive blue whale has its own season, which generally runs from May to November – although sightings are never guaranteed.
Harbor Breeze has documented most of its whale sightings on its website, with reports that its tours have seen four times more gray whales than blue whales since 2018.
Salas said that while he has extensive knowledge and experience in whale watching, there is no sure way to know what he will see on a given day.
“You can predict the weather, you can predict the wind, but you can never predict the ocean,” he said. “He cheats on you every time, so you just have to go.”
Another thing you cannot predict is the onset of a global pandemic.
Like many other businesses, Harbor Breeze was forced to close in March 2020 at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, and Salas was suddenly presented with questions he had never faced before.
“What do you do with your boats?” Salas said he asked himself. “We are as good as our employees, so how can we take care of their families?”
Finances were a concern as Salas had recently purchased a dining yacht, the Sir Winston. Salas began marketing the ship in 2019 and began filing for business in 2020—just as the pandemic hit.
“We found the first profitable source on the new boat,” Salas said. “Almost every weekend, we had a wedding. Then Covid hit, and I had to pay the money back, and I’m sitting here with a huge boat and a huge note with the bank.
Still, the company is afloat thanks in part to a $750,000 loan from the federal Paycheck Protection Program. Salas Bank worked with him to create a fair payment system during the pandemic, which was key to helping keep things on track.
“We had to do a couple of innovations to get into Covid,” he said. “Working together was good for the bank and good for us.”
Even so, Salah has stopped taking his own salary to get through the financial crisis, which he says he did in part to reduce layoffs.
Keeping the ferries operated by Harbor Breeze in operation while reducing the chances of the spread of Covid was of utmost concern. He said there was no outbreak of COVID among workers due to careful adherence to public health protocols.
As for getting back to business after the worst public health crisis, Harbor Breeze was able to reopen to customers in June 2020, but interest was low until last year.
Salas said, “In “After we left in 2021, we broke every record we expected from the pandemic,” he said. “We were hit with a wave of customers.”
In particular, Salas remembers last Fourth of July after the widespread availability of Covid vaccines.
“They wanted to go out on the ocean and feel the wind on their faces,” Salas said. “They wanted to be free.”
Now, Harbor Breeze ridership is back to close to 2019 numbers, Salas said, and this return to steady flow has prompted Salas to take the business “to another level.”
The Harbor Breeze business has long been out of the industrial park at the intersection of 16th Street and Daisy Street, but there were a number of problems that made it less than ideal.
“Sometimes the air conditioning works, sometimes the top of the building is so hot that we put four or five fans to cool it down,” Salas said.
Therefore, the company moved its business headquarters to the Union Bank building at 400 Oceangate in early May this year. The building offers a more formal and professional environment with air conditioning.
“We went from a warehouse environment to a corporate environment,” Salas said.
To make sure this transition to a professional operation isn’t simply aesthetic, Salas recently hired Kelly Baker, a Boston-based business consulting firm, to help Harbor Breeze continue to grow in a healthy way.
“They teach me how to be a better boss,” Salas said. “How do I provide my employees with a work-life balance, how do I provide a better work environment, and how can I make my business not just a customer experience, but a better place to work?”
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