Aloha,
We were met with calm water for Wednesday’s Wake up with the Whales Cruise which meant we could see a long way…and there was lots to see! Just outside of the bay we found a pod of Mom, her baby and an escort. All three of them were pretty big (Captain Will estimated baby to be 15 feet long, Mom to be over 40 feet and the escort was even bigger). The baby breached, which was fun to watch. All three of them were on the surface for a long time, and they spent much of the first half of our cruise hanging around our boat. We also saw spouts from at least 8 other whales, and some breaches out on the horizon line. When we deployed the hydrophone, we could hear singing, but it wasn’t very loud.
Guests on our 10:00 Cruise got to spend some time with a pod of very active Spinner Dolphins. We also saw 4 different Humpbacks within a couple hundred yards of us. We couldn’t decide which was the best moment of the cruise…was it the tail lob? Or was it when Mom baby and escort all swung by the boat to take a close look at us?!
Mahalo,
Claire
Captain Claire’s Humpback Fact of the Day: In Sept. 2013, Dianne Nyad completed a record breaking 110 mile swim from Cuba to Florida – but in the Humpback world, that’s nothing. Migration between Alaska and Hawaii is around 3500 miles. But Humpbacks can swim even further than that. In 2001, a Norwegian tourist snapped a photo of a female Humpback in breeding grounds off the coast of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. When he found the photo again in 2010 and posted it, researchers were able to match the flukes to a photo they had taken of the SAME whale in breeding grounds off the coast of Brazil — which means she had swum more than 6000 miles! Researchers aren’t sure what motivated the whale to swim across the Atlantic– until this whale was identified in both places; it was assumed that Humpbacks only traveled across latitudes, not longitudes. Which just goes to show you…we still have a LOT to learn.