Aloha,
Niether our guests NOR our Captain and crew could believe how much they got to see what they got to see on Wednesday’s Wake Up with the Whales Cruise. The excitement began when we saw a whale breach just outside of the bay before we had even left the bay. That breach was just the beginning of many from this Mom/calf pod who were cruising around at the dive site we call “The Pentagon”. We got to watch baby breach so many times we lost count, and Mom breached just 100 yards from us too. After the baby tuckered out, we noticed some pretty turbulent activity at the surface about a mile out to sea, so we headed that way. This turned out to be not one, but TWO separate competitive pods of 4 whales each. At first we watched each of the pods fighting amongst themselves (lots of charging around at the surface, chin slaps, and trumpeting). And then, the two pods merged into one pod of 8 very energetic whales and the battle was on. We paralleled them up the coastline for 45 minutes, again seeing lots of body slams, head lifts, chin slaps, fluke slaps and mouth inflations. When they were at the surface, they were breathing hard and making the trumpeting sound an out-of-breath whale makes as he struggles to catch his breath. Eventually, we had to turn back to the bay to get ready for our Late Morning Whale Watch Cruise — but this mega-pod just kept going.
Our Late Morning Whale Watch Cruise was different – but just as fun – as our Wake Up with the Whales Cruise. This cruise was filled entirely by the keiki and chaperones from Konawaena Elementary School and they certainly brought some kid-energy onboad with them. During the course of this cruise, we once again saw too many Humpbacks to count. A lot of them were really active — we saw at least 3 breaches, lots of peduncle throws and tail lobs, lots of head slaps and chin slaps, and a fairly active Mom/Baby duo (not the same Mom and baby from the first cruise). The most unusual thing we saw during this cruise was a Humpback surfacing with his mouth open. Some of us thought he may have been feeding (which is rare in Hawaiian waters) but the general concensus is that he was inflating his mouth to appear larger, and thus “tougher” to other whales in the vicinity.
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.