Weekend Round Up
January 29, 2024
Aloha,
We saw too much during our weekend of Whale Watching for me to provide all the details, so this report will just touch on the highlights of our cruises.
Guests on Friday’s Wake up with the Whales Cruise got some good views of over a dozen different Humpbacks, including two different Mom/Calf/Escort pods who swung by the boat to check us out. We also got to see some breaching and pec slapping from active whales who were about 250 – 500 yards from us.
We got to see more breaching during Friday’s Late-Morning Cruise. This time the breaching whales were between 400 – 800 yards away, but we were surprised a couple of times by curious Mom/Calf/Escort pods who came right up to the boat to take a look at us.
Saturday’s Mid-Morning Whale Watch Cruise started out a bit slow — we watched a very relaxed Mom/Calf duo for awhile before we saw some splashing further out to sea. We headed towards the activity and as we got to our magic 100 yard mark we realized we were watching 3 very active adults who were soon joined by a fourth adult. Once this fourth guy arrived, we got to watch these whales head lunge, roll around each other at the surface, and even got to see a breach. A couple of times, this competitive pod headed directly towards us, surfacing just 20 yards from our idling boat.
During Sunday’s Mid-Morning Whale Watch Cruise we watched Mom Humpback resting with her very little calf. The two of them were just surfacing and spouting and since baby was on the surface every couple of minutes so we got to see a lot of him. When we weren’t watching these two (who, by the way, surfaced a few times just 20 yards from our idling boat) we saw lots of other adult Humpbacks surfacing, spouting and sounding in different directions further away from us.
Sunday’s Snorkel Adventure and Whale Watch Cruise turned into quite the Whale Watch while we were travelling back to the bay after snorkeling and eating lunch. We got to watch 3 different Mom/baby duos. All of the babies were active — we watched all of them breach, and even got to see one of them do a baby head-lunge (which looks so aggressive when an adult does it, but baby’s head lunge was just adorable). Not to be outdone by her calf, we even got to see one of the Moms breach.
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.