OFF POINT LOMA - As California gray whales swam past San Diego County's shores, President Bush announced that he would allow the Navy to continue using sonar in anti-submarine warfare training off Southern California.

Environmental groups vowed to block the waivers that Bush signed Tuesday to overrule a judge's restriction on sonar testing off California's coast, saying the powerful underwater sound waves threaten marine mammals such as whales.

The government filed a motion with the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals asking for the ruling to be set aside by Friday because the next round of war games is set for next week. Late Wednesday, the 9th Circuit announced it was sending the fight back to a lower court to deal with first.

Meanwhile, whale watching boats off Point Loma found plenty of California gray whales to admire Wednesday, though an naturalist on board one ship said that their epic migration down the West Coast may have been delayed by global warming.

The White House announced Bush signed the exemption Tuesday while traveling in the Middle East. In his memorandum, Bush said the Navy training exercises "are in the paramount interest of the United States" and national security.

Peter Douglas, executive director of the California Coastal Commission, which had joined the lawsuit to provide the mammals greater protections from sonar, called the exemption unprecedented in California.

"I'm not surprised at all," he said. "It's typical for this Republican administration to ignore environmental protections under the banner of fear."

The Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group that has been suing the Navy, contends that the loud pulses sailors shoot through the water pose a significant threat to whales, dolphins and other marine mammals.

"They could inadvertently harm or kill not just individual animals, but large numbers of them," Daniel Hinerfeld, spokesman for the council in Los Angeles, said in a telephone interview.

The military, on the other hand, contends that if the ruling is not lifted, the Navy can't adequately school sailors in the art of hunting quiet enemy submarines in coastal waters where detection is tricky.

"We cannot in good conscience send American men and women into potential trouble spots without adequate training to defend themselves," said Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Gary Roughead.

Waters in high demand

What has the Navy up in arms is a Jan. 3 decision by U.S. District Judge Florence-Marie Cooper in Los Angeles that restricted use of sonar in war exercises planned off the coast of San Diego and other Southern California counties through January 2009. The next such exercise is set to begin around the middle of next week and last several days.

The ruling, called an injunction, bars sonar use within 12 miles of the shore and in an underwater canyon stretching from Santa Catalina Island off Orange County to the Navy-owned San Clemente Island west of San Diego. The canyon has a large concentration of wildlife.

The Navy likes to train in Southern California's shallow waters and underwater canyons, as they teach sailors how to detect submarines in an environment where enemies love to hide. Because of the canyons and shallow ground, and because of the thick concentration of animals, there are many sounds and they tend to ricochet in all directions, Navy officials say. It is much easier for a submarine to blend in there than in the open sea.

"The Southern California operating area provides unique training opportunities," Roughead said.

Also under the order, the Navy must shut off sonar whenever a whale or dolphin is sighted within 2,200 yards, a little more than a mile away. That's a huge change. The Navy had been turning down the volume when mammals are spotted 1,000 yards away and turning sonar off when they close to within 200 yards.

The Navy contends those rules are unnecessarily restrictive. The Natural Resources Defense Council maintains they are needed to protect whales while leaving room for the military to effectively train.

In its training, the Navy brings together an aircraft carrier with fighter jets, helicopters, destroyers and submarines. Sonar typically is generated by ships, buoys dropped in the ocean by aircraft and cables dipped in the water by helicopters.

Action called illegal

The court concluded that the Navy's sonar practices threaten mammals and violate the federal Coastal Zone Management Act. But President Bush signed a waiver Tuesday exempting the Navy from a section of that law.

"What we have seen is an action by the Bush administration which we think is illegal," Hinerfeld said. "These waivers are not going to withstand judicial review."

Scientists say loud sonar can damage the brains and ears of marine mammals. Sonar may also mask the echoes that some whales and dolphins listen for as they use their own natural sonar to find food.

But much is still unknown about how sonar affects whales and other marine life. For example, the sound can hurt some species while not affecting others, and experts don't fully understand why.

Government officials stood by the waiver and said they were not trying to circumvent protections.

Secretary of the Navy Donald Winter, in a statement, said the military already takes "extensive measures" to protect marine mammals and is committed to a stepped-up program of monitoring them.

A late arrival

For about two hours Wednesday, San Diego County journalists and tourists from cold weather states monitored more than a dozen gray whales frolicking in the surf off Point Loma. About 20 times, the grays showed off their tails for the 87 whale watchers. At one point, a two-level boat was surrounded.

Despite the successful tour, described by some as the best one given by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Birch Aquarium so far this season, Birch Director Nigella Hillgarth insisted: "We don't pay the whales."

Chelsea Rochman, a staff naturalist who lives in Carlsbad, said the migration season is peaking after a slow start. Birch annually offers tours twice daily Christmas through March. Last season, whales were spotted daily from the get-go. This time, whales were seen only every other day the first two weeks, she said.

The late arrival may have something to do with global warming.

"The ice melting (in Alaska) is making their feeding grounds larger," Rochman said. "So they may be coming from farther away."

She said they may also be fanning out because their primary food source, tiny shrimplike anthropods, is in sharp decline.

Whatever the reason for the late arrival, Rochman said, the grays already migrate farther than any other animal in the world. Theirs is a 10,000- to 14,000-mile round trip from Alaska, where they fatten up during summer, to the lagoons of Baja California, where they have their young.

As the monsters that average 45 feet long and 35 to 40 tons make their way south, they travel 3 mph to 5 mph and cover 100 miles a day, Rochman told the crowd.

She said the eastern Pacific gray whale population is relatively healthy at 22,000. It has rebounded dramatically from the early days of last century when, after nearly being hunted to extinction, the gray's numbers had dwindled to between 100 and 300, Rochman said.

- The Associated Press contributed to this report. Contact staff writer Dave Downey at (760) 745-6611, Ext. 2623, or ddowney@nctimes.com.