Where Have We Been?

January 2, 2024

Aloha,

We hope your new year is off to a wonderful start!

I apologize for the lack of posts the past few days, but we’ve been operating a lot of Private Cruises. While we’re seeing whales during those cruises, since that isn’t the main objective of the cruise, I won’t be reporting our sightings.

Saying that, here are a few highlights just to tide you over until our next scheduled Dedicated Whale Watch Cruise (which won’t be until Friday, January 5th– and since I usually don’t post over the weekend, it will be awhile until the next report).

• Guests on our Wake up with the Whales Cruise on Friday, December 29th watched 2 pairs of adult Humpbacks offshore of the Hilton Waikoloa Village Resort. One of these pairs was really in sync with each other, surfacing, spouting and sounding frequently and virtually simultaneously. We got to see these whales’ flukes on nearly every dive. The other pair was also hanging around close by to us, but they were on longer dive cycles. When we scanned the horizon we saw spouts from other whales further away, but we since we were getting such great views of our 4 Hilton-based Humpbacks, we decided not to risk that longer journey.
• Our December 30th Mid-Morning Whale Watch started with a bang as a smallish Humpback breached twice just as we were leaving the harbor. Unfortunately, most of us weren’t looking in the right direction to see those breaches, but we all did get to see a lone Humpback slapping his flukes on the water 21 times (our naturalist Dave kept count) followed by a pause in the action, followed by another series of 10 tail lobs. We also saw several Humpbacks who were fairly close together spouting at the surface (maybe the beginnings of a competitive pod), but they were too far away to take the boat over to investigate.

Mahalo,

Claire

Ocean Sports Whale Fact of the Day: When a Humpback spouts, he’s exhaling in a half of a second, 90% of the volume of air in his lungs. It’s enough air in one blow to fill up the interior of a stretch limousine. In case you’re curious, when an average size human adult exhales, he takes 3 times as long to exhale just 15% of the volume of air in his lungs — and an adult human exhalation wouldn’t even fill up a Smart Car — it’s only enough air to fill up a lunch bag.