Mom breaches in front of the boat during Saturday’s Whale Watch Cruise. Image courtesy of Jeffrey Selman.
Aloha,
We were out on the water a lot over the weekend, and here are some of the highlights:
- We’ll let the Humpbacks speak for themselves about Friday’s Wake Up with the Whales Cruise.
- On Friday’s Mid-Morning Whale Watch Cruise, we saw 3 different Humpbacks including one who decided to surprise us by surfacing just about 50 feet from our idling boat. A lot of us “jumped” when we heard that whale’s blow.
- Though we saw some spouts and surface splashes from other whales, we mostly hung out with a Mom and her calf on Saturday’s Wake Up with the Whales Cruise, and we’re so glad we did. While we were paralleling these two, out of nowhere, baby breached really close to us, followed by Mom’s breach (captured by one of our guests, Jeffrey Selman, in the photo above), followed by the baby breaching, followed by Mom breaching. After that, the baby just kept going. We must have seen 18 breaches from this little guy before we had to head back to the bay. And while we were doing that, a pod of Spinner Dolphins decided to give us an official escort, swimming all around us to check us out.
- The wind was blowing during our Saturday Mid-Morning Whale Watch Cruise, but that didn’t seem to affect the sightings. Over the course of the cruise we saw 7 different Humpbacks. We spent most of our time with a Mom/Baby pod. Baby was young (his dorsal fin was really bent over) and the two of them just seemed to be milling about on the surface. We got one pretty close encounter when baby surfaced next to the boat, but after that, Mom somehow communicated something to her calf, drawing him towards her and away from us.
- We had a lot of wind to contend with for Sunday’s Wake Up with the Whales Cruise, but it didn’t really matter as we saw our first big whale-splash right after we dropped our mooring on our way out of the bay. We headed over to the splasher and watched him spout and splash a bit more on the surface before a big commotion to the south caught our eyes. So, abandoning that first whale, we turned the boat towards the second group, realizing when we got a bit closer that we were looking at a competitive pod of two (or maybe three) adult Humpbacks. These whales were on the surface a lot and though they were kind of zig-zagging around, Captain Ryan managed to keep to their starboard, giving us all some great views of the competition. We got to see too many tail lobs and peduncle throws to keep count, and luckily, we were all looking at the right place to see a full breach followed by a half breach before we had to turn back into the wind for the exciting cruise back to the bay.
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Mahalo,Claire
Ocean Sports Whale Fact of the Day: Humpbacks produce sounds in frequencies ranging from 10 hz to 24 khz. A healthy young adult human can generally hear sounds in frequencies between the ranges of 20 hz to 20 khz which means that we’re not hearing everything the whales are singing.