So Many Muggings

Aloha,
Lots to report from our Whale Watch Cruises this weekend, so as usual, I’ll just touch on the highlights. On Saturday’s Breakfast with the Whales, we started out with a breach right in front of the boat (that’s the sight everyone wants to see). But what really made our day was a whale who was acting slightly unusually, This whale swam right below the ocean’s surface – never diving – for more than 20 minutes. After 20 minutes of paralleling him 100 yards or so away, we stopped the boat, and the whale turned and came right toward us, still on the surface. We’re thinking this guy might have been curious about what was making all the noise on the boat, (we were encouraging him to keep approaching)! Our encouragement worked, because he surfaced near us and after that close encounter to check us out, he turned away again and resumed his swim north.
On Sunday’s Breakfast with the Whales, a whale approached us again. This whale was apparently interested in us as he spy-hopped just 20 feet away from the boat. After that, he did a peduncle throw…and then breached just 50 feet away from us! Unfortunately we had to head back to the bay, but it wasn’t all bad, because we found several more whales right at the mouth of A’bay! On the 10:00 trip, most of the activity seemed to be to the south of the Bay. We found one whale who spy-hopped about 100 yards from us multiple times. We also encountered a pod of three who were swimming so hard they were trumpeting as they were spouting.
And on Sunday’s Whales & Cocktails, we were visited by a whale who wouldn’t leave us alone. Our guests named her “Pele” and she lived up to her volcanic moniker. She spent more than an hour RIGHT NEXT to the boat, swimming next to us, and underneath…and contorting her body. She spy-hopped to look at us…and after she finally moved off a bit to begin a sequence of deeper dives (showing us her beautiful flukes), each time she’d surface, she  would breach. It was absolutely incredible. All of us aboard were cheering for her like 3rd graders – a trip we’ll remember for a lifetime!
Mahalo,
Claire
Captain Claire’s Humpback Fact of the Day: 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 (and really, who can blame the researchers when there are such great opportunities to conduct their studies in sunny Hawaii during this time period?!).

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