Aloha,
We managed to sneak in a couple of very fun Whale Watch Cruises on Saturday before the weather front moved in.
Guests on our Wake up with the Whales Cruise met three different Mom/Calf pairs. All of them were cruising around offshore of the Hilton Waikoloa Village, and one of these pairs seemed interested in us. The calf in this pod was really small, and had a bent over dorsal fin from his recent passage through Mom’s birth canal. Because he was so young, he couldn’t hold his breath very long and we must have seen him at least 30 different times at the surface. Of course Mom was right underneath him, but she only surfaced 4 times while we watched. At one point, Mom let her baby venture just 20 feet from our idling boat.
Our Late Morning Whale Watch Cruise began with sightings of a couple of spouts just outside of the bay, so of course, that’s where we headed. As we got closer, we saw the development of a mini-competitive pod made up of 3 whales. These three were really active and we got to witness several spy hops and a whole bunch of head lunges from them as they worked out whatever issues they had between each other. After they calmed down, we saw another Humpback breach not once, not twice, but 10 times (we counted) a couple of hundred yards from us. Since the activity was going on for such an extended period of time, we tried to make our way over to see him but were completely suprised when a different Humpback surfaced almost within touching distance of us. Of course Captain Kai immediately stopped the boat, and we got to watch our surprise whale circle us and swim underneath us. Two hours later, our collective blood pressures still hadn’t returned to normal!
Mahalo,
Claire
Ocean Sports Whale Fact of the Day: There’s a time when a whale is still in its fetal stage that it’s covered in fur. By the time the calf is born, the fur has disappeared. Many researchers believe that this is another indication that whales have evolved from an animal with a common ancestor to a hippo. The idea that the stages of an animal’s fetal development reflect evolutionary development or “Ontogeny recapitulates Phylogeny” was first proposed by Ernst Haeckel around 1900.