We can hardly believe it but Monday marked the beginning of our 45th Whale Watch Season on the Kohala Coast!
On Monday, we operated two Guaranteed Whale Watch Cruises from Anaeho’omalu Bay. Our first Whale Watch of the day (and of the season), our Wake up with the Whales Cruise, brought us two species of cetaceans.
Not only did we get to watch a lone Humpback surfacing, spouting, and sounding several times as Captain Sam paralleled him on his journey to the south, but we were also approached by a pod of curious Spinner Dolphins.
Of course our primary goal was to watch the Humpback, and our onboard naturalist DJ was able to estimate that this whale was “mid-size” (about 40 feet long). DJ also timed the whale’s dives at 12 minutes, so when that 11 minute mark came about, we all were prepared for another sighting. Oh…and on the way back to the bay towards the end of the cruise, a couple of guests spotted another spout to our south, but that whale was too far away for us to investigate.
After we dropped the folks off from our first cruise, we re-boarded and headed out on our Late-Morning Whale Watch Cruise. This time we decided to head north and we weren’t far outside the bay before we saw 4 back-to-back breaches from a whale offshore of the Mauna Lani Resort. As we got closer to this smallish Humpback, we were all surprised when a larger Humpback surfaced at our stern. The big guy joined up with the smaller guy and they both turned around and headed south. We got to see them surface every 10 minutes for quite awhile…until all of a sudden they disappeared. Since there weren’t any whales to watch, we took the opportunity to see what we could hear and deployed our hydrophone. We heard a lot of loud, clear Humpback voices (surprisingly abundant for this early in the season). We had given up on seeing our duo again…but if we’ve only learned one thing from four and half decades of watching whales, it’s that “it’s not over ’til it’s over” and true to form, we got to see both of our whales surface again to our north pretty much exactly where they had been the first time we saw them.
Mahalo,
Claire
Ocean Sports Whale Fact of the Day: Humpbacks can be found in all of the oceans of the world — and researchers now recognize 14 distinct populations of Humpback Whales. The whales we see here each winter are part of the North Pacific population. “Our” whales feed in the waters of the Gulf of Alaska during the summer months and swim the approximately 3000 miles to Hawaii each year presumably for social reasons…giving birth to their calves and mating.
This season, we’ll be operating our 8AM and 10:30 Guaranteed Whale Watch Cruises on most Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays from Anaeho’omalu Bay, and on most Sundays, Tuesdays and Saturdays from Kawaihae Harbor. I’ll email and post updates on our Humpback sightings periodically throughout the week. If you aren’t already subscribed to our Whale Reports and would like them delivered to your inbox, please click here. If you’d like to join us aboard click here and if you have burning questions about the Humpbacks I invite you to email me at cmuchin@hawaiioceansports.com. I’ll do my best to provide your answer in an upcoming Fact of the Day!