Who’s Watching Whom?

Aloha,
The first Whale Watch Cruises of 2014 were really pretty incredible. Guests aboard our Breakfast with the Whales Cruise saw more than 20 whales, but we focused our attention on a pod of two sub-adults. At first these two whales were acting kind of aggressively towards each other, blowing bubbles and shoving each other around a bit. When Captain Ryan turned off tour boat’s engines though, the whales seemed to get very curious about us. They spent 45 minutes diving and surfacing right next to the boat. At one point, one of the whales spy-hopped (that’s what we call it when the whale surfaces vertically, holding his head above the water and looking around). The spy-hop was so close to the bow of the boat that we could have reached out and touched him! We could clearly see his eyeball looking at us!  On our 10:00 Whale Watch saw at least a dozen different Humpbacks. We saw the Humpbacks doing lots of fluke dives (that’s the posture the whales use before beginning longer, deeper dives). We also got to see the outlines of a few whales just under the surface of the water..and when we dropped our hydrophone today, we heard a lot of loud, close-by singing and vocalizations.
Mahalo,
Claire
Captain Claire’s Humpback Fact of the Day: Spy hopping is one of the ways a Humpback can see what’s going on above the surface of the water. Because Humpbacks have really big heads proportionally, their eyes are about a third of the way down their bodies. When the whale spy hops, she rises slowly and vertically from the water, head first. If she’s a fully grown whale, her rostrum may be 15 feet above the surface before her eyes get there!

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