Unrequited Love on Valentine’s Day
February 15, 2024
Aloha,
I hope you were able to spend your Valentine’s Day surrounded by love. We spent ours surrounded by Humpbacks (who we love…so I guess it couldn’t have been any better).
We hadn’t even left the bay when we encountered our first Humpbacks of the day during our Wake up with the Whales Cruise — a very calm Mom/Calf duo. We spent some time watching this pair resting on the surface together just outside the bay. While we were watching them, we got to see a Humpback breach a half dozen times about 600 yards to our south. Later in the cruise we encountered a sleeping Humpback — at least that’s what we thought she was doing. She was laying on the surface looking like a log (or as one of our guests pointed out, “a dead whale”). We watched her as she just lay there for over a minute, not really moving at all. And then she did a shallow dive, surfacing about a couple of minutes later only to float on the surface again for another minute without moving. If you’ve been following our Whale Reports for awhile, you probably know that there’s a term for pretty much every behavior we see Humpbacks doing — this one is called “logging”. For more on that, see today’s Fact of the Day.
Our Late-Morning Whale Watch Cruise featured some of the very same whales we saw on our first cruise of the day — Mom and her calf. This time though, an Escort attempted to join our duo. Momma wasn’t having it though (unrequited love?) and she started tail lobbing repetitively. Baby picked up on the excitement and he started breaching. Once he started, he didn’t stop until he had breached at least 2 dozen times. Not to be outdone, Momma breached too — simultaneously with one of her calf’s breaches. When we could tear our eyes away from all of this action, we saw other whales pec slapping and breaching a bit further away, and we even saw what we thought might be the formation of a competitive pod.
Mahalo,
Claire
Ocean Sports Whale Fact of the Day: Humpback Whales don’t sleep as soundly as we do — if they did, researchers believe that they’d drown. Humans breathe in response to carbon dioxide build-up in our blood, but Humpbacks and other marine mammals have to keep part of their brain awake at all times so they remember to breathe. When a Humpback sleeps, he floats just under the surface of the ocean, and comes up to breathe every couple of minutes. We call this behavior “logging’ as the whale looks a lot like a floating log.