Aloha,
Hope your weekend was as dynamic as ours! Friday morning’s Wake up with the Whales Cruise started out pretty slow. Both Seasmoke and Manu Iwa went out on this cruise..and we searched for more than an hour before we finally saw spouts about 3 miles off shore of the Mauna Lani. Both boats headed out to the whales, and when we got there, we were delighted to see the Humpbacks accompanied by bottle nose dolphins. We watched the dolphins interact with the whales for more than 25 minutes before we were taken completely by surprise when one of the whales breached just 30 yards behind the Manu Iwa…and everyone on both boats was looking in the correct direction to see it! On Friday’s Whales and Cocktails at Sunset Cruise, a pod of Spinner Dolphins cruised with us for awhile before we saw any Humpbacks. But when we did find a whale just south of the harbor, he completely surprised us by breaching just 75 yards from us. After this whale breached, he rolled around a bit, showing us his big pec fins as he slapped them on the surface, before breaching a second time.
On Sunday’s Wake up with the Whales Cruise, we again had to search for a long time before we saw any evidence of Humpbacks…but finally, Captain Pat saw a spout in the distance that turned out to be a pod of two whales. We watched them surface, spout and dive. And then we waited and waited and waited. After 12 minutes of patience, they surfaced and spouted and dived again. We thought we might as well wait around to see them one more time…and It was so worth the wait, when all of a sudden, they breached simultaneously just 100 yards behind the boat. But that wasn’t all….we counted 9 more breaches from these two (some of them double breaches) before they tired out and we headed back to the bay.
Mahalo,
Claire
Captain Claire’s Humpback Fact of the Day:Though most of us on Whale Watch Cruises in Hawaii are here to see the Humpback Whales, according to our friends at Cascadia Research there are actually 18 species of Odontocetes (toothed whales) and 7 species of Mysticetes (whales with baleen) that have been documented in Hawaiian waters.