Spout ID Chart courtesy of North Atlantic Society
Aloha,
The trade winds were blowing hard outside of Anaeho’omalu Bay during Thursday’s Wake up with the Whales Cruise, but that didn’t stop us from seeing Humpbacks! Guests joining us on this cruise saw at least a half dozen different Humpbacks. We got a glimpse of a breach about 1/2 mile from us. The other whales we saw were surfacing, spouting, and either slipping back under the water or sounding, showing their flukes. We got one close encounter, when 3 big Humpbacks decided to surface and spout just about 50 yards from the boat.
We weren’t very far out of the harbor before we spotted our first spouts on our Mid-Morning Cruise. Of course we headed in their direction and we got to see each of those whales dive underwater – one showed his flukes and the other slipped below the surface. We waited around for them to come back up and were surprised to see them again on the surface just about 5 minutes later. While we watched, our two Humpbacks were joined by a third whale. And then we saw a spout from a fourth whale, and then a fifth, and then a sixth Humpback, and all of them were about 75 yards from our idling boat. We were predicting that such a high density of Humpbacks in such a small area might turn into a competitive pod (when you think about it, we were close to more than a third of a million pounds of Humpbacks)…but it was more like the intersection on a super highway than a get-together, as all these whales seemed to be heading to different destinations. We got a chance to lower the hydrophone during this cruise and actually heard some loud singing (the best we’ve heard in the past few days).
Have a great weekend. I’ll send out the next report on Monday.
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.