Aloha,

Guests aboard our 10:00 Whale Watch on Wednesday got to see a total of 9 whales. We were really lucky to get to spend almost an hour and a half cruising parallel to a pod of 3 whales…Mom, her baby, and a very good sized escort. We didn’t see a lot of energetic surface displays from these 3 whales as they seemed intent on just swimming along slowly off the Kohala Coast., but we did get some nice fluke sightings from the escort. The ocean conditions were just about perfect…so we did get to deploy our hydrophone. We could hear quite a bit of singing still, though we could tell that the singers were pretty far away from us.

Mahalo,

Claire

Captain Claire’s Humpback Fact of the Day:  Based on the number of Humpback sightings we’ve been experiencing, we know that most of the Humpbacks have begun their almost 3000 mile long migration to the waters off of Alaska…which sounds like a very long swim. But in 2001 a Norwegian tourist snapped a photo of a female Humpback in breeding grounds off the coast of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. When he found the photo again in 2010 and posted it, researchers were able to match the flukes to a photo they had taken of the SAME whale in breeding grounds off the coast of Brazil — which means she had swum more than 6000 miles! Researchers aren’t sure what motivated the whale to swim across the Atlantic– until this whale was identified in both places, it was assumed that Humpbacks only travelled across latitudes, not longitudes. Which just goes to show you…we still have a LOT to learn.