Logan's Beach Whale Nursery

Every year between June and October, Southern Right Whales make the long journey from Antarctic feeding grounds to calve in the sheltered waters off Logan's Beach. The females choose this spot reliably enough that Warrnambool has built a permanent viewing platform on the dunes above the beach — and in most years the whales come close enough to observe without binoculars. Calves can often be seen learning to breach alongside their mothers, a sight that stops people in their tracks.

The platform is free to access and the beach itself is a pleasant long stretch of sand. Outside whale season it is still worth visiting for the surf and the walk along the foreshore. The caravan park adjacent to the beach is one of the best-positioned in regional Victoria.

The tourist information centre keeps a real-time whale sightings map during the season. On good days you may see multiple whales simultaneously — the record in recent years has been more than a dozen visible from the platform at once.

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A story
Southern Right Whales were hunted almost to extinction by the mid-20th century — as few as a few hundred individuals remained globally. The species' recovery since the 1970s ban on commercial whaling has been one of conservation's great success stories. The whales that return to Logan's Beach each year are individually identified by the distinctive callosities on their heads; researchers have tracked some females returning to the same nursery beach for more than 30 years.