Footprints
Aloha,
We hadn’t even left the bay on Tuesday’s Wake up with the Whales Cruise when we saw some splashing from breaching whales to our south, so we took a hard left and headed towards the commotion.
As we got closer, we realized we were looking at a pod of 4 — Momma, her baby, and 2 Escorts. These 4 weren’t traveling at all, and we got to spend most of the trip watching them surface, spout and dive repeatedly. Baby burned off a bit of energy by tail lobbing multiple times, and twice, one of the big adults swam right under our boat — he was too deep to see, but our depth finder picked him up as he cruised underneath.
Since the whales weren’t traveling, we weren’t either, and we took the opportunity to deploy our hydrophone. The sounds we heard were like a whale symphony — so many voices from so many whales. Oh…and while we were watching our group of 4 on our port side, another pod of two whales surfaced and spouted on our starboard side, presenting us with our favorite dilemma — which way do we look?? When we could tear our eyes from the close-by action, we saw spouts in every direction from more than 20 Humpbacks.
FYI — we won’t be operating any of our Guaranteed Morning Whale Watch Cruises for the rest of the week. We have several private charters on the books, and though we’ll undoubtedly see some great Humpback action during these cruises, I won’t be posting another report till next week.
Mahalo,
Claire
Ocean Sports Whale Fact of the Day: The smooth round flat spot we see on the water after a whale dives (see the photo above) is called the “footprint”. Whalers thought it was caused by oil from the whale’s skin calming the surface of the water, but water samples have proven that theory to be false. When a whale dives (or kicks just below the surface) his flukes break the surface tension of the water and create a vertical wake, forming the circular footprint.