Footprints show us where the whales last were.
Aloha,
Guests on Thursday’s Wake up with the Whales Cruise saw at least 8 different Humpbacks, but it was challenging to know where to look. Whales were surfacing, spouting, and sounding in every direction, and not in any particular pattern we could figure out. Towards the end of the cruise though, we found a more predictable pod…Mom, her baby, and an escort. Baby was up on the surface quite a bit, and diving down to Mom quite a bit too. The escort wasn’t up a lot, but he certainly made his presence known when he did decide to surface.
Guests on our Mid-Morning Whale Watch Cruise saw 5 different Humpbacks, including one pod of two who found us. We had turned the boat engines off and were just sitting and waiting for a whale to surface that we had seen dive from a distance, when a pod of two Humpbacks surfaced just 15 feet from our bow and spouted 4 times (surprising all of us — except, perhaps, Captain Kino who seems to have this uncanny ability to put the boat in the right place at the right time). After the whales sounded, we waited in the same area…and after about 20 minutes, we were just about to leave when the whales surfaced and spouted again, and again they were just about 15 feet from us. Oh…and while we were waiting for the whales to surface before that second surprise close encounter, we saw another pair of whales breach simultaneously up the coastline.
Have a wonderful weekend. I’ll send out my next report on Monday.
Claire
Ocean Sports Whale Fact of the Day: The smooth round flat spot we see on the water after a whale dives is called the “footprint”. Whalers thought it was caused by oil from the whale’s skin calming the surface of the water, but water samples have proven that theory to be false. When a whale dives (or kicks just below the surface) his flukes break the surface tension of the water and create a vertical wake, forming the circular footprint.