The moment quickly turned from horror as blood surrounded a gray whale off Dana Point to amazement and awe.

“The range of emotion couldn’t have been more extreme,” said Capt. Gary Brighouse with Capt. Dave’s  Dolphin and Whale Safari.

At first, Brighouse and others watching the gray whale just outside of the Dana Point Harbor on Monday, Jan. 2, thought it was hurt as the red blood overtook the blue ocean surrounding the mammal. Brighouse said he wondered if it was hit by a boat or had been attacked by another creature.

But when the captain and passengers realized they were witnessing the birth of a baby calf, the mood instantly turned celebratory as the newborn’s face breached the water’s surface.

“It went from horror to pure joy and astonishment,” Brighouse said of the rarely witnessed moment. “It moved me to my core.”

While it’s not unheard of for gray whales to give birth along their journey from their feeding grounds in Alaska to the warm-water lagoons in Mexico, it’s rarely caught on camera.

“As far as I know, no one has filmed a gray whale giving birth or even seen it before,” said Dave Anderson, owner of Capt. Dave’s Dolphin & Whale Watching Safari. “We were right there when it happened.”

Being there at the right time was “lucky,” Brighouse said, noting how the behavior of the whale before birth was odd as the mammal swam in circles instead of in a straight southbound line like other migrating whales.

After its birth, there was a bit of nervousness as the calf tried to come up to Brighouse’s small 24-foot inflatable boat.

“We were like, ‘Wait a minute, don’t come too close. That mom wants to protect you,’” he said, adding the cow was much larger than the boat at an estimated 35 feet long. “Mom calmly cruised between the baby and the boat, she rubbed up against our boat and our boat lifted out of the water, which was a little unsettling.”

Brighouse and the passengers were so close to the calf he could see its nostrils opening up to get one of its first breaths, he said. “Mom’s main goal is to push it up and get it to the surface to learn how to get air.”

Stacie Fox, who shot images of the birth from another Capt. Dave’s boat, said it was a bucket-list moment.

“I was screaming my head off, I was super excited,” she said. “I definitely thought that it was something I would not see unless I was going down to the lagoon. It’s once-in-a-lifetime type stuff.”

An older gentlemen on board was celebrating his birthday, so all the passengers agreed the newborn should share his name and dubbed it “Severin” in his honor.

Due to bad ocean conditions on New Year’s Day, Monday was the whale-watching company’s first day of 2023 with charters back on the water. Fox called the calf their “little new year baby whale.”

Capt. Chase Moore with Dana Wharf Sportfishing & Whale Watching was on the Ocean Adventure heading back to the harbor when he got a call from Capt. Dave’s about the whale giving birth.

“Once we returned, we saw the newborn calf just minutes old,” Moore said. “The mom was gently lifting the calf to take breaths, while the calf seemed to be resting on her back.  Other moments we could see the calf’s floppy fluke, as this newborn calf was learning to swim.”

The pair will continue south to the warm waters of Baja for the winter where the calf would be expected to gain about 50 pounds a day and grow about a foot in length each month, according to Dana Wharf experts.

Researchers and scientists are carefully monitoring the gray whale species. The National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration in 2019 declared an Unusual Mortality Event after an alarming number of dead gray whales — many starved and emaciated — started washing up along the West Coast.

The following year, 2020, 172 washed up dead from Canada to Mexico. In 2021, the number was 115, and last year it was 104.

In a typical year, based on data collected since the 1990s, there are about 35 strandings annually, according to NOAA.

Researchers are still keeping a watchful eye on four telling factors: the body condition of the whale and whether they look emaciated, the timing of the migration and if they are later than usual due to foraging for food longer, the number of calves and the number of strandings or deaths.

Whaling pushed the species near extinction in the 1800s, but measures taken starting in the 1930s and 1940s to protect the whales helped the population to rebound. NOAA’s latest population estimates about 17,000 gray whales, down from 26,960 since 2016.

Brighouse said he thinks about the journey ahead for the baby whale, the longest for any mammal on Earth.

“This baby now has the most dangerous next few months of its life. It has to make it down to Mexico still, so mom can nurse it, get it to the right weight to make the 6,000-mile journey back,” he said.

Along the way, it will have to dodge ship propellers, try to avoid entanglement threats and elude orcas that may target it as a meal.

“Thinking about that baby and the incredible journey it has to survive,” Brighouse said, “it just boggles the mind.”