Spinner Dolphins and Competitive Humpbacks
Aloha,
Our Monday Wake Up with the Whales Cruise began with sightings of a pod Spinner Dolphins about a mile offshore of Anaeho’omalu Bay. These little cetaceans seemed as happy to see us as we were to see them, because they made the choice to swim right over to the boat to play for awhile in our bow wake. After watching them flip and spin and corkscrew for about 10 minutes, we took a right hand turn and headed toward some big spouts we saw in front of the Mauna Lani Resort. This turned out to be an excellent idea as we soon realized we were watching a competitive pod of 5 Humpbacks (we figured they were competing with each other because we got to see some head lunges — plus they were travelling really fast). When we could force ourselves to look away from this action, we saw several spouts in different directions from other surfacing whales, and we even saw some Humpbacks tail lobbing a bit further away.
Guests on our Late Morning Whale Watch Cruise spent some time watching a “tri-pod” of Humpbacks — two really big adults and one slightly smaller adult. These three were definitely interacting with each other — kind of rolling around each other on the surface and then disappearing from view for a couple of minutes undoubtedly continuing their competition underwater. After watching this group for about 20 minutes, they started heading further away from us so we turned the boat and began to make our way back to the bay. On the way back we were completely surprised by a big whale who surfaced in front of us, causing Captain Will to put the boat into idle immediately. We watched as this whale headed right towards the boat before diving and swimming underneath us. We also got to see lots of spouts from other Humpbacks surfacing in all directions, and lots of flukes from sounding whales.
Mahalo,
Claire
Ocean Sports Whale Fact of the Day: When a Humpback spouts, he’s exhaling in a half of a second, 90% of the volume of air in his lungs. It’s enough air in one blow to fill up the interior of a stretch limousine. In case you’re curious, when an average size human adult exhales, he takes 3 times as long to exhale just 15% of the volume of air in his lungs — and an adult human exhalation wouldn’t even fill up a Smart Car — it’s only enough air to fill up a lunch bag.