Mom and Calf – Image Courtesy of Paul Norris
Monday’s Wake up with the Whales Cruise started off with a sighting of a breach to our south. Before we could get to that whale though, we found ourselves between 3 different pods of 2 whales.
Each of these groups surprised us by surfacing and sounding — all of them were about 150 yards away from us. We got to see several nice views of their flukes before the whales dove deeply. When we deployed the hydrophone, we heard some whales’ voices, but all of them were pretty far from us.
As soon as our guests disembarked from this cruise we re-boarded with new guests and set out for our Mid-Morning Cruise. During the course of this cruise we saw more than 15 different Humpbacks. Most appeared to be sub-adults, and though we didn’t witness any competition between them, we saw several repeat breaches and lots of shallow diving (where the whales seemed to just disappear beneath the surface). As we approached Kiholo Basin (about 6 miles south of the bay) we saw a big spout and a tiny spout right next to each other. These spouts were produced by Momma whale and her very young calf. The little guy was a lighter gray color, and spent considerable time swimming in little circles just above his mom. We got to watch him spy hop twice (that’s what we call it when the whale rises vertically out of the water with his eyes above the surface) — probably looking at us. While he was doing that, Mom started slapping the surface with her pectoral flipper (maybe trying to rein in her little one?).
When we deployed the hydrophone during this cruise we heard lots of great sounds from closer-by whales. Oh, and we even saw a couple of peduncle throws from a very big Humpback, but he was a bit further away from us than we could travel.
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).