Aloha,

On Friday’s Breakfast with the Whales Cruise, we saw a couple of different Mom/Baby/Escort pods. Lately, we’ve been noticing that our Mom whales have been allowing their curious calves to approach the boat for an investigation, and that’s exactly what happened today. We had two close encounters from two different calves…of course where the calf goes, Mom is close to follow, and each Mom let her calf hang out with us for a little while. We also found a competitive pod with 2 escorts, a Mom, and her calf. One of the escorts in this pod was acting pretty aggressively with lots of trumpeting. There were too many breaches, tail lobs, head lunges and peduncle throws from this pod to even keep track. We went back out again from

10:00 – 12:30, and from 12:30 – 2:30. During the course of these two trips we saw more than 35 Humpbacks. On the first trip, we saw one Mom/Baby pod who did come right up to the boat. We also saw quite a bit of tail lobbing and a few peduncle throws, and for the grand finale…a full breach very close by. On the second trip, the whales were a little quieter, but we did get to see another close-by breach.

Mahalo and have a great weekend. I’ll send out the weekend recap on Monday.

Claire

Captain Claire’s Humpback Fact of the Day: According to researchers, the sleep process for a Humpback is most likely very similar to how their little toothed cousins, the dolphins, sleep. EEG readings from sleeping bottlenose dolphins show that the dolphins shut down half their brains at a time to rest. The active half presumably is monitoring breathing and perhaps scanning the surroundings for predators. Bottlenose dolphins sleep approximately 33% of the day, but stay asleep for only a couple of hours at a time.