Spout ID Chart courtesy of North Atlantic Society
Aloha,
The seas were calm on Christmas morning, and so were the whales! Guests on Seasmoke’s Wake up with the Whales Cruise could see for miles, and spotted a pair of Humpbacks up near Puako, so that’s the direction we headed. When we got there, we watched them surface and spout and dive just about 100 yards from us for several cycles. They were only staying underwater about 4 minutes, so we got lots of great views of these whales while spotting some other spouts further away from us. Since the water was so calm, we took advantage of the conditions to just float with our hydrophone deployed, listening to a veritable symphony of Humpback songs.
There was a totally different energy level during our Whales & Cocktails at Sunset Cruise. We came across a pod of 3 very competitive and active whales just north of the harbor. They were pec slapping, and tail lobbing and basically chasing each other around all over the surface. Of course all that activity required them to breathe a lot — so they weren’t under water very long when they did dive. For a short time, our pod of three were joined by another pod of two, but they didn’t stay long, and we continued to parallel our original pod. Interestingly, our naturalist Greg was aboard this cruise, and he thought this pod looked very similar to the pod of three competitive whales he was watching during our morning Whale Watch Cruise on Sunday which left from Anaeho’omalu Bay…of course he couldn’t be sure if they were the same three whales, but he noted that both days, the pod was composed of two big whales and one small whale, and both days, he observed the pods demonstrating the same behaviors at the surface.
Mahalo,
Claire
Ocean Sports Whale 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.