A Little Bit of Everything

March 12. 2024

Aloha,

We got to see a little bit of everything during Monday’s Wake up with the Whales Cruise. Even though the winds were still blowing, we saw evidence of somewhere between 25 and 35 different Humpbacks including 3 different Mom/Calf duos. For 25 minutes, a competitive pod of 6 Humpbacks paralleled the boat — we saw one of those whales breach about 200 yards from us and we also got to see some head lunges, tail lobs, pec slaps and peduncle throws from this very active and aggressive pod. Often when it’s windy, we aren’t able to deploy our hydrophone — but we found a calm enough moment between the gusts today that we got to lower the microphone, allowing all of us the chance to listen in to a lot of different Humpback voices.

After we dropped the folks off from that first cruise, we re-boarded and headed out for our Late-Morning Whale Watch Cruise. This time, we took a right hand turn out of the bay and found ourselves surrounded by a competitive pod of at least 8 Humpbacks (it was impossible to count). These whales were ramming each other and thrashing around at the surface. We stayed with them (or they stayed with us) for most of our cruise, passing close to us several times. When we could tear our eyes away from this action, we saw quite a few Mom/Baby duos, and when we found a moment to deploy the hydrophone, it was so loud that it sounded like a Humpback was singing directly into that underwater microphone!

Mahalo

Claire

Ocean Sports Whale Fact of the Day: One of the questions we get asked most frequently when we’re watching active whales splashing at the surface like we saw today, is “Why are they doing that”? We’ve always guessed those splashes were some form of communication, and recently our theory was vindicated. Researchers watching Humpbacks off of Australia observed that breaching occurred most frequently when other whales were about 2 1/2 miles away, and repetitive tail and flipper slapping occurred most often just before new whales joined or left a pod. They also observed all these behaviors more often when it was windy (we’ve observed this in Hawaii too)! So…creating a big splash may be a Humpback’s way to say “Hey — Guys — I’m over here! C’mon over (or Don’t Go)! I’m excited, I’m tough, I’m irritated…”.