Aloha,
Remember that kid’s game “Ring around the Rosie”? Well, that’s what happened to us during Wednesday’s Wake up with the Whales Cruise, and we were the “Rosie”. We spent most of the cruise being circled by 3 very inquisitive and playful whales. These three got so close to our idling boat that at one point we were gazing into one of the whale’s eyes (it was beautiful). A couple of times the group disappeared on us, so we almost gave up, but each time, after about 15 minutes, they surfaced again, only to swim around the boat another time. In whale watching parlance, this is called being “mugged”, but we kind of like the children’s song reference better, as the whole experience made us happy in ways that a mugging wouldn’t.
We left the bay on our Late Morning Cruise looking for that competitive pod from our first cruise, but before we could find them we saw a Mom/calf duo breaching repetitively. Of course we veered over to see them, but they stopped breaching and dove before we got to that magic 100 yard mark. Once we got to where we thought they might be, we stopped the boat and deployed our hydrophone. As we listened to some very loud singing, we watched a lone whale approach. Mom and baby surfaced and our lone whale began trailing them. Once the lone whale sounded, the singing got really loud. Eventually, we were able to turn off the hydrophone and listen to the song reverberating through our hulls while we actually looked at our singer who was drifting just below our stern.
Mahalo,
Claire
Ocean Sports Whale Fact of the Day: As we mentioned in today’s report, we don’t always need to deploy our hydrophone to hear the whales singing. When singing whales are very close to the boat, their songs reverberate through the hulls. Is this experience responsible for the origin of the Greek myth of the sirens? In Greek mythology, sirens were the beautiful creatures who lured sailors with their enchanting music to crash on their islands. Now imagine you were a sailor in say, 2000 BC, listening to these haunting sounds in the hold of your ship…who (or what) would you think was responsible for their creation?