Aloha,
The size of the surf really surprised us when we got to work on Monday morning…the weather forecasts we read suggested we’d have a swell but nothing like what we encountered. But, we were still able to get the boat in and out of the bay safely, and we were glad we did. On our 8:00 Wake up with the Whales Cruise, we found our first pair of whales way out to sea. We watched them surface, spout and sound twice before heading over to see what we thought might be Mom and calf (we got a call from another boat telling us about them). We never found the mom and calf but we did find ourselves almost surrounded by pods of two whales each at our 9:00, 12:00 and 3:00 — all between 100 – 150 yards away. So we got lots of sightings in pretty much every direction.
After we dropped the folks off from that cruise, we went right back out again for another Whale Watch Cruise. This time we saw several breaches straight out of the bay. As we headed towards the action, we encountered a Mom, her baby, and two other whales. Baby was doing some pec slapping, and the others were kind of hanging around — not really pursuing Mom, but not leaving her either. After we left this pod of four, we were just cruising up the coast when a different whale surprised us by surfacing just 25 feet off our starboard bow, and swam quickly past us. Turns out he was on the move to join 2 other whales up ahead. This group quickly became competitive, and we watched them jockey for position near the surface, and even got to see a head lunge from one of them just about 50 feet away. Throughout the course of the cruise we also saw several breaches — one of them was just 75 yards off our starboard bow.
Mahalo,
Claire
Mahalo,
Claire
Captain Claire’s Humpback Fact of the Day: Did you know that you can identify the species of whale by the size and shape of its spout? Humpbacks create that distinctive 10-15 foot tall pear shaped plume…sperm whales create an angular blow, grey whales create a bushy v shaped blow, and blue whales — the biggest species of whales– typically create a 30 foot tall cone shaped blow.