Gray Whale swimming at surface, Pacifica CA 4/23/26

This Gray Whale was swimming at/near the surface of the water near shore for an extended period of time. It's not clear to me exactly what it was doing. It did not appear to be feeding, or at least not its typical feeding behavior. I did not see it diving down to the bottom, nor did I see any typical sediment plumes. However as I watched the video, the thought occurred to me that it sure seemed like it was feeding. So maybe it was finding something at/near the surface that it was eating. There were a lot of Velella Velellas floating on the surface. While I don't think I've heard of Grays eating Velellas, I wonder if that's what it was trying to do. Or maybe there was something else that was brought in by the wind/currents that I couldn't see that it was feeding on?

This is a mostly-unedited version of the footage I shot, and is significantly longer than what I typically post. Watching its behavior was fascinating to me, and I thought it might be interesting to others. I will also create another, smaller version and post that later. In the first half of the video, the whale spends a lot of its time directly in the sun's glare. He does finally move out of the glare somewhere around the 31min mark.