Print The 100-foot-long whale dived and circled in the murky, dark waters of the Santa Barbara Channel, looking for a cloud of krill to scoop and catch inside her 20-foot-long jaws. As the blue whale began to resurface, whale scientist Brandon Southall was in a boat nearby, and he could feel his throat go dry. The whale was coming up right beneath a 200,000-ton transoceanic cargo ship, named the Maladarko, that was heading east from Hong Kong to its destination in Long Beach Harbor. “We were plotting the two paths,” said Southall, a researcher at UC Santa Cruz and the president of an Aptos-based marine biology research firm. “It was a straight collision course.”