Aloha,
In Friday’s post, I promised to recap our weekend Whale Watch Cruises today, but now that I start typing, I’m realizing we saw way too much for me to provide all the details, so here’s a bit of a summary.
We only ran one Whale Watch on Saturday — our Late Morning Whale Watch Cruise. The wind was still blowing, so in an attempt to stay out of the strongest gusts, we took a turn to starboard as we exited the bay and hugged the coastline. We saw a 1/2 dozen different Humpbacks off shore of the Fairmont Orchid in various directions, but ultimately decided to head back south again when we noticed a tiny spout next to a huge spout. As we approached this Mom/Baby duo, we realized that it wasn’t just the baby’s spout that was tiny — the baby was too. For awhile it appeared that Mom was trying to teach her baby to pec slap. We also got a chance to see baby rolling around on Mom’s huge rostrum (head). So adorable.
Captain Kai estimated that we saw more than 16 different Humpbacks during Sunday’s Wake up with the Whales Cruise. As we exited the bay, we saw lots of spouts straight to our west, so despite the wind, we agreed it was worth it to head out to sea. As we settled in place about 3 miles from shore, we were surrounded by lots of pods of two Humpbacks, and a couple of pods of 3 and 4. None were particularly close to each other or to us, but we did get to see a Humpback breach about 300 yards away. Later in the cruise, we encountered a Mom/Baby pair. This calf was quite a bit bigger than the calf we saw on Saturday (but definitely not adult-size) and this calf’s bottom times were almost rivaling Mom’s bottom times.
Sunday’s Late-Morning Whale Watch Cruise started with a bang. We found ourselves the object of interest for 3 big Humpbacks who decided to surface right at our bow and along our port rails VERY close to our idling boat. These whales were so close that we could see their tubercles, prompting our naturalist DJ to explain a lot about those “whale bumps” (see today’s Fact of the Day for more on tubercles). Our Humpbacks were apparently interested in DJ’s explanation, because they stuck with us for 3 (short) dive cycles before disappearing. We did see other whales during the cruise, including a couple of breachers further out to sea, but our focus was on the whales that were focused on us.
Mahalo,
Claire
Ocean Sports Whale Fact of the Day: All mammals have hair. Humpback Whales are mammals… so where is their hair? Humpbacks have rows of bumps on their chins that we call “tubercles” (you can see them in the image above). Out of each one, sticks a hair that’s about 1/2 inch long that we call a “vibrissa”. Because there’s a nerve ending underneath each hair, and blood flow to the nerve, we know the whales use these hairs to sense something…but we’re not sure what they’re sensing. Quite likely, they use their hairs like cats use their whiskers – for proprioception…or perhaps these hairs work in a coordinated fashion with sensory organs in their chins helping the whales to know when to open and close their mouths around schools of prey.