A week and a half ago my friends and I had booked passage on an Oceanic Society whale watching cruise to go check out the whales on their yearly migration. The tickets were a bit pricey but the excursion was a full 6 and a half hours out on the open ocean so seemed well worth the money. That is until we got the dock and there was no one to be found. We walked around for 30 minutes till we had to do exactly what the piece of paper said not to do and called the harbor master. He said there was a number we should have called and the trip was more than likely cancelled to high seas. So sad and dejected we headed back to the road to get a cab. When none came by after 10 minutes we called Yellow Cab and the dispatcher said one would be there in 10 minutes. 20 minutes go by so no cab so we called back. 10 more minutes he harked as a shiny Yellow Cab pulled into view. He saw us and had to do a quick lane change at a light to get onto an approach vector to swoop us up. Well to our utter awe when the light changed he looked at us and swerved across 2 lanes and drove the other way. Fast. God bless the reliability of the Yellow Cab! No disrespect to our own Joann who herself is a Yellow Cabbie but I calls em as I see em. So I digress. No whales. No cabs. No food. We head up the road headed to the tourist trap up the road to grab some lunch when after about half a mile another cabbie sees us in distress and rescues us and whisks us back to the Upper Haight. $30 lighter after the 2 cab rides we unearth the other sheet the Oceanic Society faxed over and there was indeed a number we were supposed to call so our bad on that one. So at the point the trip was cancelled you’d think that the Oceanic Society would promptly and swiftly refund our ticket prices since no service at all was rendered. They didn’t even send a representative to meet us and tell us it was off after all. Not a chance! If you read the fine print you have to actually CALL them and REQUEST a refund. Because after all it was our fault that my friends flew into San Francisco to go on this trip and got the shaft from Mother Nature. And when you do indeed call to get your cold hard cash refunded they have the audacity to charge you $2 per ticket as a handling fee!!! Excuse me? Talk about robbery on the high seas! We figure if they just have a phone and a website and never go out on a cruise they can make a nice chunk between the people who forget to call and the others they bilk out of the $2 a head. So the long and short of it is I can’t condone a business who takes advantage of their customers this way. When did Harbormaster equal Ticketmaster? What a load of seahorse shit. I urge you to never book charter on an Oceanic Society cruise.