Aloha,
We operated a whole bunch of Whale Watch Cruises over the weekend — and it was kind of a mixed bag as far as sightings were concerned.
On Friday’s Wake Up with the Whales Cruise we got to watch 4 different Humpbacks including an old friend who (sadly) we were able to identify by a notch on his neck just behind his dorsal fin caused, no doubt, by an encounter with a boat propeller. We know we saw him last year too, so we were happy to see the encounter hasn’t impacted him heavily. On our Friday Late Morning Whale Watch Cruise we were the object of curiosity for 3 whales who swam over to our idling boat “mugging” us. After looking at us on the surface, they took a shallow dive and then spent considerable time swimming just under the surface and under the boat — we loved watching them watch us.
On Saturday, we operated both our Wake Up with the Whales Cruise and our Late Morning Whale Watch Cruise from Kawaihae. And though we drove north, south and west as far as we could in the time allotted for both cruises, and though we spoke with all the other boat captains in our area, no one was able to find any Humpbacks. We deployed our hydrophone during both trips, and we could hear whales singing…but none of them surfaced anywhere near us. We called both trips a “Fluke” and invited all our guests to try their luck with us on another Guaranteed Whale Watch for FREE.
Guests on Sunday’s Kawaihae Wake Up with the Whales Cruise met a half dozen different Humpbacks. All of them were in pods of two, and none of them were particularly big whales. We also got approached by a pod of Spinner Dolphins who definitely lived up to their name — these little cetaceans were jumping and spinning all over the place (it was almost as if they were jealous of all the attention we were paying to the Humpbacks). Our final Kawaihae cruise on Sunday was the Late Morning Whale Watch Cruise. On this cruise we found one of our Humpback duos from our first cruise, hanging out pretty much where we had left them. As we watched, this pair was joined by a larger lone Humpback — however none of these whales seemed particularly excited by the meet-up. Towards the end of the cruise, we saw some other whales on the horizon breaching and slapping their flukes, but they were too far away for us to investigate.
Mahalo,
Claire
Ocean Sports Whale Fact of the Day: The Whales “mugging” us are definitely taking a look at us. Though Humpbacks rely on their sense of hearing far more than any other sense, we do know that vision is also important to them. Based on the shape of the Humpbacks’ corneas, they can certainly see us…but, they’re probably a bit farsighted when looking through water and a bit nearsighted when looking through the air. And in case anyone asks you, Humpbacks have beautiful brown eyes. Their eyeballs weigh, on average, 2.16 pounds. Human eyeballs weigh about a quarter of an ounce.