Baby Breaches

Aloha,
Monday’s 10:00 Whale Watch started off as a dolphin encounter. Just as we left the harbor, we encountered a pod of Spinners who found us to be quite the attraction. As soon as they heard the boat, the made a B-line towards us so they could surf our bow wake. We saw lots of spins and end-over-end flips from these guys. We then found a Humpback who was swimming pretty fast on the surface. We paralleled this whale until we saw encountered a second whale. The two started competing a bit, and we saw some pectoral slaps and peduncle throws from the two of them. On our Snorkel Sail, Captain Will reports finding a Mom with a very energetic calf. We were under sail, but the calf must of thought it would be fun to check us out as he swam over to us and then started breaching just about 100 yards from the boat. We saw 5 breaches from this little guy including one complete flip! And on the Champagne Sunset Sail, we found 3 pods with two whales in each. These pods were all off shore of Puako, and all these whales were big adults.
Mahalo,
Claire
Captain Claire’s Humpback Fact of the Day:  Yesterday, I promised to tell you the rest of the Humphrey the Humpback Whale story. After successfully luring Humphrey to the ocean in 1985, researchers were a little surprised to see him back in San Francisco Bay again in 1990. This time, he got stuck on a mud flat south of Candlestick Park. Rescuers from the Marine Mammal Center and the US Coast Guard used a cargo net and a boat to free him. Then, he was guided out of the Bay to the ocean by a flotilla of boats behind him full of people banging on steel pipes (a Japanese fishing technique called “oikomi”). At the same time, those same attractive sounds of Humpbacks feeding that lured Humphrey out to sea in 1985 were broadcast from boats in front of Humphrey. It worked. Since then, Humphrey’s story has been memorialized in a number of children’s books, a movie and he even has a Facebook page!

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