Aloha,
On Thursday’s Wake up with the Whales Cruise from Anaeho’omalu Bay, we saw a spout just after we got out of the bay. We headed towards that whale and when we got several hundred yards away, we got to see him lift his big flukes and dive below the surface. We waited around for him to surface, and eventually saw him spout again about 200 yards from us. Later in the cruise, we were surprised by a Humpback who decided to surface close to us off our starboard rails, After spouting and checking us out, this whale just kind of disappeared. Finally, 10 minutes before we were supposed to end the charter, two more Humpbacks surfaced close by. This sighting caused us to extend our charter a few minutes — it’s so difficult to drive away from the whales!
And on our 10:00 Signature Whale Watch, though we saw other spouts, we spent most of our time with a competitive pod of three large whales.. We watched quite a bit of aggression going on in this pod as they chased across the surface…including bubble blowing, trumpeting, head lunging, and jaw clapping. We watched as these whales lifted their flukes high in the air figuring they’d be taking long sounding dives, but then they surprised us by surfacing just 7 minutes later with some huge, loud spouts.
Hope you have a wonderful, whale-filled weekend. I’ll send out a recap of our sightings on Monday.
Mahalo,
Claire
Captain Claire’s Humpback Fact of the Day: Humpback Whales play host to all kinds of other animals. Besides the barnacles we often see on the Humpbacks’ flukes and other skin surfaces, the whales can also carry tape worms, lung worms, sinus flukes, and whale lice (which are related to skeleton shrimp) among others. Not all of these parasites actually harm the whale (which means that technically, they can’t really all be considered “parasites”). In fact, the barnacles might actually benefit the male Humpbacks who appear to use the sharp edges of the shells (perhaps inadvertently) as weapons during competitive battles.
