Double Breach – Image courtesy of our good friend, Rodger Berge
Throughout the course of Wednesday’s Wake up with the Whales Cruise from Anaeho’omalu Bay, we saw at least 17 different Humpbacks. Some of them were a couple of miles away, but even those whales were pretty active. In fact we got to see one of those distant whales slap his huge flukes onto the surface of the water 15 times in a row (we counted).
Today was a day of competition though. Almost all the whales we saw were in pods of 3 or 4, and even though we couldn’t tell for sure whether the pods were interacting with each other, they were certainly interacting within their own pods. Half of us got to see a simultaneous double breach about 200 yards away from the boat, and all of us got to see plenty of flukes as these different whales took sounding dives. At one point we were completely surrounded with pods at our 12:00, 3:00, 6:00 and 9:00 — we had to keep our heads on swivels as the pods surfaced kind of unpredictably.
Oh…and we watched a lone whale swim under our boat from our 6:00 to our 12:00 — maybe trying to join up with that 12:00 pod, but unfortunately we were running out of time, so we couldn’t stick around to see if a new coalition (or competition) formed.
Mahalo,
Claire
Ocean Sports Whale Fact of the Day: When we watch a surface active competitive pod of whales, we assume it is comprised of one female either leading or being chased by a group of males. It often appears that every male is competing with every other male for access to the female. Recently though researchers have observed that male humpbacks may form coalitions, working together to corral the female so that one may have easier access to her.