The gray whale watch is on along the Washington coast and inside Puget Sound.

Now is the time to get up close and personal with these huge creatures, which are traveling from their breeding areas off Baja California to their arctic northern Pacific feeding grounds in the Chukchi and Bering seas.

The whales make the longest journey of any mammal by traveling around 14,000 miles round-trip.

Gray whales average 40 to 45 feet in length and weigh up to 50 tons, twice the size of a killer whale. There now are about 23,000 gray whales, but in the mid-1800s they were close to extinction.

The best way to spot a gray whale is to look for their spouts, which can reach up to 15 feet high.

Gray whales tend to migrate close to the coast and can be easily seen from shore as well as from tour boats.

Click here to read the complete story in the Seattle Times.