Aloha,Guest joining us on Monday’s Mid-Morning Whale Watch got an early Christmas gift! We spent most of our cruise with our favorite Humpback duo…Momma and her calf. The little calf was very little, so he must have been born very recently. And like all little ones, he was curious about his environment…especially that big floating object making all those noisy, happy “oohs” and “aahs”. Mom was pretty protective, but after awhile she did allow her calf to get within about 50 feet of our idling boat, and of course we did what we could to let them know how happy we were to welcome this little addition to our world! Oh…and if Mom and Baby weren’t enough to make us happy…later in the cruise, a pod of Spinner Dolphins cruised by to pay us a visit.
We saw a pair of whales spouting while we were heading to our snorkel site during our Snorkel and Whale Watch Adventure Cruise, so we headed over to take a look at them. They sounded, but before they surfaced again, we saw two other pods of two Humpbacks spouting and sounding. All 6 of these whales had pretty long bottom times, so we decided to go snorkeling instead of waiting around. On our way back to the bay after snorkeling and lunch, we saw spouts from a pod of two Humpbacks. This time, we got to see them both breach TWICE, and then one of them decided to breach one more time before we had to leave them.
Mahalo & Mele Kalikimaka me ka Hau’oli Makahiki Hou
Claire
Ocean Sports Whale Fact of the Day: At birth, a Humpback whale calf weighs between 2,000 and 3,000 pounds which makes us think, “Poor Mom — that’s gotta hurt!”. But the calf actually weighs somewhere between just 3% and 4% of his Mom’s weight. Interestingly, at birth, human babies are proportionally larger, averaging 4%-5% of their Mom’s weight.