Not at All Peaceful

Aloha,

Guest joining us on our Thursday Wake up with the Whales Cruise from Anaeho’omalu Bay didn’t have a moment of peace (and that was A-OK with us). The trip started with sightings of a Mom/Calf duo who were breaching right outside of the bay. After watching Mom breach a couple of times and the baby breach and lunge 4 times, we spotted a competitive pod a bit further out and headed over to check them out. This pod turned out to be comprised of 6 EXTREMELY active whales (presumably 5 males and one who was not). For the next hour and 15 minutes, we watched them slamming into each other on the surface, slapping their flukes, head lunging and generally creating mayhem. When we deployed our hydrophone, we actually could HEAR the sounds made by the whales when they slammed into each other. It was incredible — in fact one of our guests who had been joining us regularly since 1997 said it was the best trip he’d ever been on, and we’d have to agree — this was a trip for the record books.

The whales had calmed down a bit by the time we got out of the bay on our Late Morning Whale Watch Cruise — but there still was a lot to see. We were literally surrounded by spouting and sounding Humpbacks. We got to watch a Mom/Calf/Escort for awhile, and we saw a second Mom and calf too. For a few moments it looked like these two pods were on a collision course, but the protective Moms were able to keep the pods separated. When we deployed the hydrophone on this cruise, we heard some very unusual sounds — sounds we’ve never heard before which we can best describe as “growling”.

Mahalo,

Claire

Ocean Sports Whale Fact of the Day: Humpbacks produce sounds in frequencies ranging from 10 hz to 24 khz. A healthy young adult human can generally hear sounds in frequencies between the ranges of 20 hz to 20 khz which means that basically, we’re not hearing everything the whales are singing.