An Actual Arc of Breaches
Aloha,
We spend the first 70 minutes of our Tuesday 90 minute Wake up with the Whales Cruise watching multiple pods of two and three Humpbacks spouting pretty much everywhere we looked. We couldn’t approach any of these whales even to the 100 yard mark because each of the pods was being watched by other boats (and we never want to crowd the whales). Not only did we see spouts, but we also saw plenty of dorsal fins and plenty of peduncle arches and plenty of flukes as the whales sounded…so everyone aboard was pretty satisfied. As we were heading back towards the harbor to conclude the trip, we were surprised when a sub-adult Humpback (about 30 feet long) did a complete breach about 20 yards off our starboard bow (see the photo above — and mahalo to our crewmember extraordinaire Sara, for sharing the moment). But that was just the beginning…this whale breached over and over and over again making an arc of breaches around our bow. While all that was going on, a Mom and her calf approached our port bow (so now we didn’t know where to focus our eyes). For awhile, we thought the breacher was trying to attract the attention of Mom, but then he was approached by another fully grown Humpback and the breacher calmed down as the two swam off together. Was our breacher a young male trying to assert dominance? Was the breacher a lone female Humpback trying to divert that big whale’s attention from the close-by Mom and calf? Was the breacher trying to make some other point to any of those whales? We wish we knew — we’re just happy we were in the right place at the right time to witness that excitement.
We were only out about a minute before we saw our first breach on our Late-Morning Whale Watch Cruise (though it was kind of far from us). This Humpback turned out to be part of a duo, and the duo found us interesting enough to surface just about 25 yards from us. Later in the cruise we found a Mom/Calf/Escort pod. We got to see baby on the surface 5 different times (Mom and the Escort were staying right underneath that calf but didn’t surface nearly as often). Towards the end of the cruise, when we all thought our sightings were done for the day, we were surprised yet again by 3 different Humpback duos who surfaced about 100 yards from us, and we had just enough time left in the cruise to see all three of these pods a couple of times before we had to return to the dock.
Mahalo,
Claire
Ocean Sports Whale Fact of the Day: Since today’s report was so long, I’m providing a short fact today — Did you know that in the early part of the 19th century, whales were hunted for more than just their blubber (which was used primarily as lamp oil)? The meat was used mainly for fertilizer, the baleen was used for umbrella and corset stays, and their organs were processed to extract vitamins.