LunaBlu Radio Show
About This Event
My name is Rebecca Kress, and I have a weekly radio show called LunaBlu. This Friday, I’ll be highlighting World Ocean Day 2026 with a couple of live guest interviews and relevant music. Anyone can listen live with the free app called TuneIn to KNYO 107.7 from 12=3pm California time. I also volunteer with the Noyo Center for Marine Science and help educate children and the general public about watersheds, rivers, oceans, pollution and climate change.
I organized river clean-ups of 50 miles of the Russian River for 20 years, removing 6,128 tires and hundreds of tons of trash, toxins and scrap metal. I also helped implement the Adopt-A-Watershed Program, was a teacher of Project WET and taught water education K-12 here in Mendocino County.
Beginning in 2013, a perfect storm of environmental disasters struck the Mendocino Coast. Unprecedented marine heatwaves triggered an outbreak of sea star wasting disease, devastating the sunflower sea star—the purple urchin’s primary predator. Without this critical check on their population, purple urchins multiplied rapidly, eating their way through our underwater landscape and transforming lush kelp forests into barren wastelands, coining the term “urchin barrens”.
One of my anticipated guests is Sarah Grimes from the ocean science center, and she is a stranding specialist. Her job is to go out and rescue marine life from our beaches here in Mendocino County, and sometimes she gets up to 4 or more calls a day. She also led the necropsy of a recently deceased gray whale. She deserves a medal. Or two, as she is on call 24 hours a day and is considered an expert.
The Noyo Center for Marine Science also has the skeleton of a blue whale who was struck by a ship, which shattered her vertebrae. She was named Betty, and a new Whale House LaBoneatory is currently under construction to house her articulated skeleton.
During the Gray Whale migration, Fort Bragg hosts its annual Whale Festival, and I interviewed whale experts from the U.S. and Mexico. I used to have a friend who was a whale researcher in Baja, Mexico named Urmas Kaldveer. He started a nonprofit called Miosa, whereas he would identify whales and photograph them. Once, he let me jump in with a young Blue Whale, just to say I did it. I think I saw a fin! He said that I was in the whale’s essence, so that made me a whale swimmer. 🙂
My passion, besides playing great music, is to foster people’s sense of wonder and a desire to protect our waterways and our oceans. My radio show can potentially reach a lot of listeners, as it’s streamed around the world. If it is only a few, then I still feel good about that. I’m looking forward to participating in World Ocean Day 2026! Thanks for this tremendous effort, Rebecca