Aloha,
We left the bay on Tuesday’s Wake up with the Whales Cruise under windy conditions. That meant we had to travel a bit more slowly, but it was ok since we found 3 Humpbacks offshore of the Hilton Waikoloa Resort. One of them was definitely on his own, but the other two were surfacing and sounding synchronously. Our duo had pretty short dive times too (around 8 minutes) so we got to see them often. At one point they appeared to be heading towards us when they sounded, and sure enough, our naturalist DJ put his GoPro in the water and was able to just barely catch their images as they swam past us underwater. At the very end of our cruise, those of us looking to our south got to see another solo whale tail lob a few times just past the mouth of the bay.
Guests on our Late-Morning Whale Watch Cruise spent a lot of time with a Mom Humpback and her little calf. At first, they were simply heading south. Baby was on the surface every few minutes, and we got to see Mom surface and spout about every 10 minutes. About half way through the cruise, baby started acting up — wiggling around and lifting his head, only to splash it down onto the surface a few moments later. When an adult Humpback head lunges, it appears to be an aggressive move, but when baby does the same thing, it’s absolutely adorable. Oh, and we deployed our hydrophone several times during each cruise and never really heard much of anything. We thought the equipment might be malfunctioning, but we dropped a couple of ice cubes into the water near the microphone and could hear them plop into the water as clear as day, so it seems like no one had anything to sing about on the Kohala Coast today.
Mahalo,
Claire
Ocean Sports Whale Fact of the Day: At birth, a Humpback whale calf weighs between 2,000 and 3,000 pounds which makes us think, “Poor Mom — that’s gotta hurt”!. But the calf actually weighs somewhere between just 3% and 4% of his Mom’s weight. Interestingly, at birth, human babies are proportionally larger, averaging 4%-5% of their Mom’s weight.