Sounding – Image courtesy of Dan DeLaMatter
Aloha,
The winds were blowing, and the ocean was a bit bumpy during Friday’s Wake up with the Whales Cruise, so we couldn’t stop to deploy our hydrophone. Even though we couldn’t listen to the whales, we still got to see them. We found a fairly big lone whale towards the beginning of the cruise and he stayed with us for the whole trip. He was on a 12 minute dive cycle, so we got lots of surface time with him. While we watched our close-by whale, we saw another Humpback off in the distance. As we watched, this second whale joined our first whale, and this newly formed two-some swam off to sea together.
Guests on Saturday’s Wake up with the Whales Cruise had two interesting experiences. In the beginning of our cruise, we were joined briefly by a single Bottlenose Dolphin (when we see dolphins, it’s almost always Spinners…and regardless of species we very rarely see dolphins swimming by themselves). After he left us, we saw a lone whale to the north of the bay and went to check him out. He was on about a 10 minute dive cycle, surfacing just to spout 4 times, and then sound. When he sounded, we got some great views of his flukes, and while he was underwater, we deployed our hydrophone. The sounds we heard were very loud and very clear, and stopped when he surfaced…so we know we were watching the singer. We did hear some faint singing as well…which means there was another male somewhere around us, but we never got to see any evidence of him at the surface.