Aloha,
Guests joining us for Wednesday’s Wake Up with the Whales Cruise got glimpses of a half dozen different Humpbacks but got to know a pod of two adults fairly well.
The first whales we spotted during this cruise were spouting straight to our west as we exited the bay, but on the way out to see them, we spotted a different pair who were a bit to our north and much closer so we turned the boat towards to starboard to investigate. As we arrived in their vicinity, they each lifted their big flukes and sounded. After waiting around for awhile, they surfaced and spouted a few more times before sounding again. This time we thought to check the time…and when they surfaced a third time, we clocked that they had been underwater for 18 minutes. After they dove, and not wanting to wait around for another 18 minutes (Humpbacks tend to maintain pretty predictable dive cycle times), we headed south towards another pair of spouts, but we couldn’t catch up with those whales. Luckily “our” pod of two surfaced nearby for our 4th viewing of them before they headed back underwater, and we had to head back to the bay.
Mahalo,
Claire
Ocean Sports Whale Fact of the Day: On today’s Whale Watch we saw that pair of whales’ flukes so often that we started thinking about the etymology of the word “fluke”. We know that the triangular tip of an anchor is called a fluke, and since a whale’s tail sort of resembles an anchor, that made sense. But why would we call a weird occurrence a “fluke”? So I looked it up…”fluke” comes from the German word “flugel” which means wing (that makes sense, because a whale’s tail looks a little like a wing). The phrase “just a fluke” is of unknown origin, but it was first used to describe a lucky shot in billiards. Since there’s a fish also called a “fluke” — it’s a flounder — the phrase might have come about as a pun on “floundering” In other words, if you “make a fluke”, you’re just floundering, and your success is merely due to luck.