Humpbacks – Mom & Baby
Aloha,
Guests joining us on Monday’s Wake up with the Whales Cruise saw 7 different Humpbacks including our first Mom/Calf pod of the season! Mom and baby didn’t seem too interested in the boat, so after getting a glimpse of them we headed out to watch other whales. Later in the cruise, we encountered a competitive pod of 4 very active adult Humpbacks. We got to see 4 breaches from them, some pec slapping and even a few peduncle throws. When we deployed our hydrophone, the sounds we heard were very clear, and pretty loud too.
After that cruise, we took some folks out on an Exclusive Whale Watch Cruise. Just as we exited the bay, we saw a whale announcing his presence by breaching, so we headed his way. He kept at it (we saw 6 breaches from him) and when we stopped the boat, we watched him swim right over. He spouted at our 11:00, and then crossed the bow and spouted at our 1:00, and then swam down the starboard rail clearly taking a look at us before spouting again at our 2:00 (and during this encounter, he was just 25 yards from us). He must have learned what he wanted to learn, because after that close encounter, he took off. Later in the cruise we saw another breaching whale (or perhaps it was 2 breaching whales) but they stopped breaching before we could get to that magic 100 yard mark.
Finally, guests on our Pau Hana Sunset Sail saw a spout just outside the bay while we were still on the mooring, so of course that’s where we headed. The whale was by himself, and both Captain Adam and our head naturalist Greg were pretty sure that this was the same young whale they had seen 3 times before. The first couple of times we saw him, he was accompanied by a bigger whale (we guessed it was a Mom/yearling duo) but if it really was him we were seeing again, and if he had been accompanied by Mom in the past, it appeared that Mom had finally abandoned him. Anyway, similar to our other encounters with him, he was very curious about the boat. He stayed right with us, surfacing nearby often. At one point he surfaced right at our port stern (we could have almost touched him) before submerging again. When we could tear our eyes away from our young friend, we saw other whales spouting in various directions further out to sea.
FYI, we aren’t running any cruises on Tuesday, so I’ll post the next report after Wednesday’s cruises.
Mahalo,
Claire
Ocean Sports Whale Fact of the Day: A baby whale, called a “calf” looks so small and cute when seen playing with her Mom. But everything is relative…when the calf is born, she can already be 10 to as much as 15 feet long, and she weighs 2000 to 3000 pounds! The calf is about 26 feet long when it’s weaned (at 10-11 months).