Whale milk floating in the water.
Guests on Wednesday’s Wake up with the Whales Cruise spent substantial time with a Mom/Calf pair. The calf was really small and was acting like the infant he was. We watched him attempt to dive down to Mom multiple times. Some of his dives were quite smooth, and others were, to put it kindly, quite uncoordinated looking. We were thinking he may have been nursing during some of his underwater times. When we looked up from this pair and scanned the horizon we got to see lots of different surface behaviors — from breaches, to head lunges, to tail lobs…but all of those whales were a way’s away from us.
Thursday’s Mid-Morning Cruise started off with a bang — actually two bangs. Just as we left the harbor, a Humpback launched himself completely out of the water in front of us and then immediately after that, he did sort of a head-lunge back flip. After that moment of pure excitement, we found a Mom/Calf/Escort trio. The baby was really small, and spent a lot of time resting on Mom’s rostrum and pectoral flipper at the surface. This trio kept swimming slowly towards the boat and since the calf was so small, Captain Jason did his best to keep backing the boat away from them. We also got to watch a pod of two Humpbacks surfacing and diving in concert. And when we looked further away, we got to watch some other breaching from whales a couple of miles from us.
Mahalo,
Claire
Ocean Sports Whale Fact of the Day: Being mammals, Humpback Moms feed their calves milk. But Humpback milk isn’t just any old milk — it’s extremely rich with a fat content of approximately 50% so it doesn’t dissipate quickly in salt water (see the picture above). As a comparison, human milk contains only about 4.5% fat. Supposedly, Humpback milk tastes like “sweetened cod liver oil” …but I’m going to have to rely on what I read to verify that description!