Second Verse, Same as the First

Aloha,

There was another big swell hitting the island on Thursday, but luckily, it didn’t affect our whale sightings. Guests on our 8AM Wake Up with the Whales Cruise from Anaeho’omalu Bay met a very young calf and his Mom just south of the bay. This little one still had a bent-over dorsal fin indicating a recent birth. After watching them for awhile, we saw spouts from another Mom and calf pod to our west. This calf was considerably bigger than the first one we saw, and the pod appeared to be on the move, so after watching them for a few minutes, we left them and  turned north towards where we were seeing several breaches from an adult Humpback.  The breacher was hanging out with several other big whales, and though there wasn’t a fierce competition going on between them (at least on the surface), we got to watch them lunging, rolling around, and chasing each other. We also got to see their huge pectoral flippers on several occasions.

On our second Whale Watch of the day, our 10:30 Late Morning Cruise, we got to revisit several of the whales we had met on our earlier cruise. Oddly, that doesn’t happen to us very often. But this time around we found our Mom and tiny calf again — they were still hanging around in shallow water south of the bay. We also got to spend some time with our competitive pod from the 8AM cruise. They still hadn’t resolved their issues with each other, and they were still shoving each other around a bit at the surface. We got to see them roll over onto their dorsal sides (their backs) and lift those huge pectoral flippers into the air again too.

Mahalo,

Claire

Ocean Sports Whale Fact of the Day: A Humpback Whale has a big heart. An 80,000 pound whale’s heart averages just over 400 pounds, and according to measurements made by the Nelson Institute of Marine Research, beats an average of somewhere between 10 and 30 times per minute. Happy Valentine’s Day!