Aloha,
When we found out that we’d finally be able to get back onto the water on Wednesday, our first reaction was a big “Hallelujah”! That storm that hit the state last week was a big one and we heard that another storm is threatening to hit us at the end of this coming week. So anyway, we took the opportunity while it was available and operated both of our Wednesday Guaranteed Whale Watch cruises.
On both cruises we spent some quality time with a Mom/calf pair. We first spotted this pair just outside of the bay while we were boarding guests on to our Wake up with the Whales Cruise. Luckily for us, the pair didn’t seem to be in any particular hurry to go anywhere, and we spent the entire first cruise watching them. At one point, we saw a spout from a lone Humpback a bit further out to sea, but our lone whale never approached Mom and Baby. Baby was kind of squirmy on the surface and seemed to be diving on and under Mom fairly frequently.
By the time we got back out for our Late-Morning Whale Watch Cruise, our Mom and Baby had moved further out to sea. Again, they were by themselves (no Escort in sight). Baby was way more active on the surface during this second cruise. We got to see him breach — but we couldn’t really see that anything in particular precipitated that breach — no other whales were around, and Mom was simply surfacing, spouting and sinking back under the water, so our best guess was that the baby was just playing around.
Oh and we were able to deploy the hydrophone during both cruises, and really all we could hear was Mom’s voice and Baby’s voice.
Mahalo,
Claire
Ocean Sports Whale Fact of the Day: Humpback Whales have massive tongues. An 80,000 pound Humpback has a two-ton tongue! If you had a similarly proportioned tongue, and you weighed 150 lbs, your tongue would weigh 7.5 lbs (in actuality it weighs around 3.5 ounces).