The Flood Gates Have Opened

Aloha,

It seemed like the floodgates have been opened, and overnight the Humpback population density along the Kohala Coast has increased dramatically. Guests on Thursday’s Wake up with the Whales Cruise from Anaeho’omalu Bay were completely surrounded by whales. Every direction we looked, we’d see someone surfacing and spouting or lifting their flukes and diving.

Throughout the course of the cruise we must have seen two dozen different Humpbacks but we spent most of our time watching a very active competitive pod of 6 whales. These whales were battling  and chasing each other all over the place. We saw head lunges, pec slaps, tail lobs and multiple instances of the whales shoving into each other and twisting and rolling around to dive. We turned our engines off a couple of times to deploy the hydrophone and we heard some pretty-much indescribable new sounds from the whales — sounds we had never heard before. Interestingly (to us, at least), every time we turned the engines off during the cruise, our competitive pod seemed to disappear, but when Captain Will fired up the engines (and these are pretty quiet engines), the pod show up again to swim past the boat.

Guests joining us on our Late-Morning Whale Watch Cruise saw spouts, dorsal fins and/or flukes from at least 20 different Humpbacks. Again, we saw them in every direction we looked. Highlights of the cruise included catching the tail end of a back-to-back breach from two Humpbacks who were close to each other and then a single breach from another lone Humpback. When we looked waaaaayyyyyy out on the horizon, we saw splashes from many more breaching Humpbacks too.

Mahalo,

Claire

Ocean Sports Whale Fact of the Day: According to the experts at NOAA, in 1966 when commercial whaling was finally banned, the Humpback population in the North Pacific was estimated to be fewer than 1400 individuals.