Humpback Slaps his Huge Pectoral Flipper
Aloha,
The winds were calm on Wednesday morning but the whales weren’t! During our Wake up with the Whales Cruise we saw more than a dozen Humpbacks. Most of them were in pods of two, but we did find one pod of four who were competing a bit at the surface. For awhile, we watched one of them tail lobbing repetitively upside down (her belly was towards the sky). Of course we couldn’t be sure that this was actually a female doing those upside down tail lobs, but we have heard that female Humpbacks who are not receptive to male attention will position themselves like this so that they’re facing away from the pursuing males.
On our Snorkel and Whale Adventure Cruise we saw a few whales on the way to our Snorkel Site, but most of the surface action occurred as we were sailing back to the bay. We saw lots and lots of spouting and sounding, and even a few peduncle throws from a lone whale.
Meanwhile, up in Kawaihae, guests on our Signature Whale Watch were surrounded by a multiple calm Humpbacks. The only surface activities we saw were towards the end of the cruise, when we found a couple of pec slapping Humpbacks.
Mahalo,
Claire
Ocean Sports Whale Fact of the Day: A distinguishing morphological (body) characteristic of the Humpback is the length of her pectoral flippers. Their average length is 1/3rd the length of the Humpback’s body (approx. 15 feet). The genus name for the Humpback (Megaptera) describes this flipper – the translation from Latin for Megaptera is “Big – Winged”.