Aloha,
We woke up on Monday to some pretty strong trade winds, but not too strong to take the boat out on a Wake up with the Whales Cruise. Though we had to go kind of slowly and though we traveled almost all the way up to Hapuna Beach it was totally worth it when we finally got there. Yes, we saw spouts here and there on the way up…but what drew us to the area was the repetitive splashing from a Humpback who was tail-lobbing. Turns out there were actually 4 whales in the pod, and after we got within a hundred yards or so, they decided that we worth checking out, and they all swam right around and under us! After they tired of playing with us, we turned around for a quick downwind cruise along the coast and back to the bay. On the way, we saw a couple of breaches on the horizon.
We also went on a modified Whale Watch and Lunch Cruise from Anaeho’omalu (we couldn’t snorkel because of the combination of wind and swell). We had a lot of fun and saw lots of spouts. lots of splashing around at the surface and even a triple sounding dive (3 humpbacks lifting their flukes at once).
Mahalo,
Claire
Captain Claire’s Humpback Fact of the Day: In 1919, R.G. Meyers, who was working towards his PhD in Chemistry at Stanford University, conducted a chemical analysis of Humpback whale blood collected from the thoracic cavity of a whale killed in Monterey Bay. He found that the Humpback’s total cholesterol level was similar to a healthy human’s, but the glucose level was 4 times what’s considered a “healthy” level for a human. Since there are not a lot of carbohydrates in a Humpback’s diet, he theorized that a Humpback’s liver and pancreas work differently than ours.