Last One of the Season

Aloha,

I can’t believe I’m going to type these words, but Monday’s Wake Up with the Whales Cruise from Anaeho’omalu Bay was our final dedicated Whale Watch Cruise of the season. Now that’s not to say that all the Humpbacks have migrated away from our coastline — after all, no one tells the Humpbacks that the season is over — so we expect we’ll see the occasional Humpback during our Snorkel Adventure Cruises and Pau Hana Sunset Cruises over the next couple of weeks (at least we hope we will)!

Guests joining us on our Monday morning cruise saw a half dozen Humpbacks. We spent most of our time with a very tranquil Mom/Calf duo. They didn’t appear to be accompanied by an escort, and they were swimming slowly south. Baby surfaced to breathe about 3 times as often as Mom, but the entire time we watched them they did nothing but surface, spout a couple of times, and then sink below the surface. We took a moment to deploy the hydrophone during this cruise, and we heard some whales’ voices, but they were all pretty far from us.

Once again, as our season comes to a close, I want to say Mahalo Nui to all of you who read and commented on these posts. It makes us happy to know that you care about the Humpbacks as much as we do!

I also have to offer my Mahalo to our hard-working Captains and naturalists. Working on our catamarans, especially during Whale Watch Season, is a dream job, but having experienced it for decades as a Captain and a naturalist before I started writing about it, I know that the job is an intense one too.

We look forward to sharing more adventures with you next season…and of course, whenever we see something exciting from our boats, I’ll be sure to give you a head’s up! In the meantime, if you have questions about Hawaiian marine life (or our cruises), feel free to shoot me an email too.

Mahalo and A Hui Hou (“Thank you and till we meet again”)

Claire

Ocean Sports Whale Fact of the Day: We now know that not every Humpback who survives the summer season in Alaska will choose to migrate back next winter. Based on information compiled by our favorite researcher Chris Gabriele and her cohorts for the National Park Service in Glacier Bay and Icy Strait, at least 10 Humpbacks have been documented spending one winter off the coast of Sitka, and at least one off the coast of Juneau. We really don’t know how common this behavior is because almost no photographic identification research takes place in SE Alaska over the winter (and really, who can blame the researchers when there are such great opportunities to conduct their studies in sunny Hawaii during this time period?!).