A Positive Dilemma

Aloha,

Guests who joined us on our Tuesday Wake up with the Whales Cruise from Kawaihae didn’t have to wait a long time to see Humpbacks. In fact, we weren’t even out of the harbor before we saw our first three spouts! We decided to head south though, and got to spend some time with a Mom and her little calf who were resting in shallow water just outside of the Kawaihae break wall. As is always the case with this type of pod, we saw a lot more of baby than we did of Mom, although several times while we watched, the baby disappeared under his Mom for extended periods…we guessed he might have been nursing. Since neither of them seemed too interested in moving from their location, we decided that we didn’t want to risk being a bother and we headed down the coast. Besides seeing lots of spouts and lots of peduncle arches and a few flukes from sounding adults in our area, we also saw some breaching way to our north (too far to investigate). On our way back in to the harbor at the end of our cruise, two adult whales surfaced just 50 yards off our stern (we had no idea they were there, but based on where they surfaced, we’re sure they knew exactly where we were).

As we left the harbor for our second trip of the day, our Late-Morning Whale Watch Cruise, we encountered one of our favorite dilemmas…which of the 8 – 10 spouters we could see was going to turn out to be the most surface active whale? We decided to head straight west, and we got to see several pec slaps from one Humpback and a couple of breaches further away. One guest mentioned seeing some tail lobbing but by the time the rest of us focused our attention in that direction, the whale had finished slapping his flukes. On our way back into the harbor a Humpback breached at our stern, but only DJ, our naturalist was looking in the right direction to see it. Oh, and when we deployed our hydrophone during this trip, we were able to discern a lot of Humpback voices, so we know there were many, many more whales in our area who were choosing to remain below the surface.

Mahalo,

Claire

Ocean Sports Whale Fact of the Day: Being mammals, Humpback Moms feed their calves milk. But Humpback milk isn’t just any old milk — it’s extremely rich with a fat content of approximately 50% so it doesn’t dissipate quickly in salt water (see the picture above). As a comparison, human milk contains only about 4.5% fat. Supposedly, Humpback milk tastes like “sweetened cod liver oil”…but I’m going to have to rely on what I read to verify that description!