Aloha,
We saw lots of fun stuff on our Whale Watch Cruises on Thursday. Alala began the day with a Special Educational Whale Watch Cruise for 21 three and four year old Montessori School kids from Waimea and their parents and teachers. As usual when we have lots of kids on board, we got to see some fun action (we think the whales hear the kids and want to see what all the excitement is about). Over the course of the cruise we saw 12 different Humpbacks including a Mom and her calf. Baby was really, really small and spent considerable time on the surface trying to make his way over to the boat!
On Seamoke’s Wake up with the Whales Cruise, guests had to be patient. It took us almost an hour to find some surface active whales (we saw lots of spouts and dorsal fins during that time) but it was all worth it when two very big, and very active whales found us. They began breaching (both of them) repetitively very close to us…we also saw quite a few head lunges from this pair.
Head Lunge (Image courtesy of Crew member, Gary)
Finally on the Alala 10:00 Cruise, we saw more than a dozen different whales including the Mom/Baby pair from our first cruise. We really thought we’d find Mom and Baby where we left them at 9:30 on the first cruise…but when we got back to the same spot 20 minutes later, they were nowhere to be found. We watched lots of other adult humpbacks spouting and diving though, and finally found Mom and baby towards the end of our cruise further out to sea. Baby wasn’t as interested in checking us out this time, but we did get to see a beautiful fluke dive from Mom. This was kind of unusual, since Moms rarely dive deeply (probably because they don’t want to leave baby on the surface)…and we rarely see a Mom’s flukes.
Hope you have a wonderful weekend. I’ll send out a recap of our Humpback sightings on Monday.
Mahalo,
Claire
Captain Claire’s Humpback Fact of the Day: Did you know that you can identify the species of whale by the size and shape of its spout? Humpbacks create that distinctive 10-15 foot tall pear shaped plume…sperm whales create an angular blow, grey whales create a bushy v shaped blow, and blue whales — the biggest species of whales– typically create a 30 foot tall cone shaped blow.