Humpbacks Charge Past the Boat
I apologize for the lack of recent posts, but to be honest, we’ve had nothing to report. A couple of very strong weather fronts moved through the island chain towards the middle of last week, so we ended up cancelling entire days’ worth of cruises.
The ocean finally calmed down enough for us to head out for Friday’s Wake up with the Whales Cruise from Anaeho’omalu Bay, and everyone aboard that trip agreed it was a great one.
Shortly after leaving the bay we encountered a competitive pod. Though we got to watch these whales for over an hour, and though the whales chose to spend most of that time within about 25 yards of our idling boat, we were never able to determine for sure whether we were watching 3 or 4 Humpbacks. This group was extremely active on the surface — we saw lots of tail lobbing, and lots of backwards tail lobbing, along with a lot of heavy breathing and general surface turmoil. While this group was swimming all around us, we got to see another whale breach just about 200 yards from us inline with our close-by group…which means everyone was looking in the right direction to see the breach (if you read this blog regularly, you know how rare it is for everyone to see a full breach).
On Saturday’s Mid-Morning Whale Watch Cruise, the winds were light but the surf was up. We got to see one Humpback spouting a few times, but that wasn’t good enough for us, so Captain Kimo called it a “Fluke” and we invited everyone aboard to join us again on another Whale Watch Cruise for FREE!
Mahalo,
Claire
Ocean Sports Whale Fact of the Day: Not all whaling activity occurred during the “golden age of whaling” at the beginning of the 19th century. Based on catch records corrected for illegal Soviet whaling, a total of more than 200,000 Humpback Whales were killed in the Southern Hemisphere from 1904 to 1980. Also, Illegal Soviet takes of 25,000 Humpback Whales in two seasons (1959/60 and 1960/61) precipitated a population crash and the closure of land stations in Australia and New Zealand.