We had some fantastic Whale Watch Cruise this past weekend. On Friday, on both our Wake up with the Whales Cruise from Anaeho’omalu Bay, and our 10:00 Whale Watch from Kawaihae, we were mugged! Guests on our 8:00 am Cruise watched 4 Humpbacks for more than 45 minutes as they spy hopped and also hung out right beneath the boat. Guests on our 10:00 Cruise also were accompanied for 45 minutes by a couple of curious Humpbacks who first got our attention when they both breached very close by! Words don’t really capture what these encounters were like, so I’ve uploaded some video here.

On Saturday’s 10:00 Whale Watch Cruise, we saw more than 20 different Humpbacks, including one pod of two who were cruising along the surface. Just as we thought we had seen the last of them, one of them breached just 100 yards from us. Right after that, they breached simultaneously…and then we saw 4 head lunges and another breach. We were also fortunate to watch a Humpback in a different pod tail lob repetitively and do several peduncle throws that appeared to land right on top of the whale chasing her (of course this could have been two males that were posturing and fighting too),

On Sunday’s 10:00 Cruise, we saw whales spouting even before we got out of the harbor. For most of the cruise, we could see spouts and dorsal fins on all sides of the boat. We were all pleasantly surprised when a Humpback spouted just 75 yards off our starboard rails (he must have swung by to take a look at us). And for a grand finale, we got to see several pectoral slaps from a different Humpback.

Mahalo,

Claire

Captain Claire’s Humpback Fact of the Day: A distinguishing morphological (body) characteristic of the Humpback is the length of her pectoral flippers. Their average length is 1/3rd the length of the Humpback’s body (approx. 15 feet). The genus name for the Humpback (Megaptera) describes the flipper – the translation from Latin for Megaptera is “Big – Winged”).