Aloha,
On Thursday, we operated both our Wake up with the Whales Cruise and our 10:00 Signature Whale Watch on Seasmoke from Anaeho’omalu Bay.
On our 8:00 Cruise, we saw two separate Mom/Calf pods…only one of whom was accompanied by an escort. Both pods were pretty quiet, and both spent a lot of time near or at the surface, so we got lots of sightings (and a few tail lobs). When we deployed the hydrophone during this cruise, the sounds we heard were really loud, so we know there were some whales quite close to us that we couldn’t see.
After we dropped the guests off from our first cruise, we re-boarded and headed right back out again for our Signature Cruise. We kind of thought we’d see the same pods and see similar activities since we were back in the same area so soon after we had left it. This time though, we only found one Mom/Baby pod, but they were very interested in us. They were only in about 75 feet of water (we could see the bottom)…and they seemed to be curious about our boat as they approached us closely. We even got to see Baby breach a couple of times (we always wonder if those little calves are excited, or antsy, or just being playful)!
Finally, on our Sail with the Whales Cruise, we sailed past Mom and Baby off shore of Honoka’ope Bay and soon after they dove, we saw a few spouts ahead of us. On our way back to the bay, we were surprised by a Humpback who did a full breach at our 9:00. That certainly caught our attention…and we watched him as he did 3 more partial breaches. When we got a little closer to the bay we saw a couple of other cetaceans…they were too big to be Spinners, and we’re thinking they were probably Bottlenose dolphins, but they didn’t come close enough to us for us to positively identify them.
Mahalo and have a fun weekend. I’ll send out a recap of our weekend Whale Watch Cruise sightings on Monday.
Claire
Captain Claire’s Humpback Fact of the Day: Where do the Humpbacks go when they migrate away from Hawaii? Most of them appear to migrate directly north, to feeding grounds off of northern British Columbia and southeastern Alaska waters. But they can migrate to just about any location round the Pacific Rim — one humpback satellite-tagged in Hawaii spent the summer in Russian waters.