Too Many to Count

Aloha,

There were Humpbacks all over the place during Monday’s Wake up with the Whales Cruise from Anaeho’omalu Bay. Throughout the cruise, we were surrounded by big adult whales, who were surfacing, only to spout a few times, lift their flukes and disappear under the water again. Towards the end of the cruise we were surprised when a Mom and her calf surfaced about 50 feet behind our boat. We stopped to watch them watching us for several minutes. While these two were on the surface, a couple of other adult Humpbacks surfaced at our bow a bit further away.

Our Late Morning Whale Watch started off with a bang. We hadn’t even gotten out of the bay before we saw breaching about 800 yards from us, so as soon as we had maneuvered past the shallow coral at the mouth of the bay, we headed towards the action. We spent the next 30 minutes or so watching a competitive pod battling it out at the surface. We must have seen a total of 15 breaches and lunges (too many to keep an accurate count) before the pod split up. We spent the rest of the cruise watching various adult Humpbacks surfacing, spouting and sounding, though we did get a glimpse of a Mom/Calf/Escort pod from about 400 yards away before we had to call it a day and head back to our mooring.

Mahalo,

Claire

Ocean Sports Whale Fact of the Day: Humpback Whales have massive tongues. In fact, an 80,000 pound Humpback has a two-ton tongue! If you had a similarly proportioned tongue, and you weighed 150 lbs, your tongue would weigh 7.5 lbs (in actuality it weighs around 3.5 ounces). Whales’ taste buds appear to be atrophied (probably allowing them to only sense saltiness – not sweet, sour, bitter or umami)…and they are unable to protrude their tongues from their mouths.