Aloha,

On Thursday’s Breakfast with the Whales Cruise, we had to work a bit to find the whales, but when we did…what a show! We started the cruise with sightings of two adult Humpbacks. We saw them spout a few times, and then saw their flukes as they began longer deeper dives…so we decided to move on. We motored around some more until we saw some splashes so we went to investigate. The splashes turned out to be from a pod of two competing whales. One was obviously chasing the other around, and the whale that was being chased appeared to be pretty irritated (or excited) because we got to see this whale breach SEVEN times about 100 yards from the boat!

Mahalo and have a wonderful weekend. I’ll send out the weekend recap on Monday. It’s hard to believe there are only 4 days of this fantastic 2012/2013 Humpback Whale Season left for us. Luckily for all us whale watchers, a lot of these whales don’t seem to know the season ends on Monday and seem to be sticking around!

Claire

Captain Claire’s Humpback Fact of the Day: As we bid “aloha” to the Humpbacks this season and eagerly await their return, we now know that not every Humpback who survives the summer season in Alaska will choose to migrate back next winter. Based on information compiled by our favorite researcher Chris Gabriele and her cohorts for the National Park Service in Glacier Bay and Icy Strait, at least 10 Humpbacks have been documented spending one winter off the coast of Sitka, and at least one off the coast of Juneau. We really don’t know how common this behavior is because almost no photographic identification research takes place in SE Alaska over the winter months (and who can blame the researchers when there are such great opportunities to conduct their studies in sunny Hawaii instead??!!).