We ALL Saw It (and that rarely happens)
Aloha,
Our President’s Day Whale Watch Cruises departed from Anaeho’omalu Bay. Guests on our 8AM Wake up with the Whales Cruise spotted their first whale straight off shore of the bay. By the time we got to him though, he had lifted his flukes and disappeared from sight…so Captain Maika turned to starboard and headed north towards Honoka’ope Bay (near the Mauna Lani Resort). We found another lone Humpback in pretty shallow water there, and were delighted when he breached (in fact almost all of us were looking in the correct direction to see that breach, and that hardly ever happens). After he breached he lobbed his tail once, and then lifted his flukes and disappeared. Later in the cruise we deployed the hydrophone — we could hear some singing, but it was pretty faint. We spent the rest of our trip watching lone Humpbacks in various directions surfacing, spouting and sounding.
Our Late-Morning Whale Watch Cruise started off kind of slow. It took us 20 minutes to find Humpbacks, but once we got about 2 miles offshore, we found a few Humpbacks who were travelling south in a hurry. We got to see 4 breaches from them before we turned back and encountered a Mom/calf pair. Baby breached a half dozen times getting as close as 50 feet to our idling boat and then Mom surprised us by surfacing just 10 feet from us. When we deployed the hydrophone on this cruise, we got to listen in on some very close-by singers.
Mahalo,
Claire
Ocean Sports Whale Fact of the Day: Where do the Humpbacks go when they migrate away from Hawaii? Most of them appear to migrate directly north, to feeding grounds off of northern British Columbia and southeastern Alaska waters — but this isn’t always the case. Just this morning we got an email from a long time guest, Clarke R. who took a photo of a Humpback’s flukes offshore of Kawaihae back in 2019 and submitted it to the website HappyWhale (a website that allows citizen scientists to help track the movements of individual marine mammals around the world). Clarke was just notified that “his” Humpback was spotted off Chukotka Russia at the end of October! Whoo! That Humpback sure gets around…and a big Mahalo to Clarke for sharing the news with us!