Aloha,

The rainy weather caused us to cancel our early morning Whale Watches on Tuesday, but as soon as we could go out again, what we saw more than made up for the first part of the day. In fact, on our Whales and Cocktails Cruise, we saw so many different spouts as we were leaving the bay that we weren’t sure which direction to head (one of our favorite dilemmas)! Captain Shane decided to take us south and we were rewarded quickly with a very curious calf and his permissive Mom. Much to our delight, she let him investigate the boat at close range. We then saw a competitive pod of 6 whales charging across the surface. There was lots of trumpeting from these hard-breathing whales. After that, we saw another pod of Mom/Baby, and this time an escort surfaced with them. For a grand finale, Mom breached twice, and the baby got into the excitement too, breaching multiple times.Our onboard naturalist Angelica estimates that throughout the duration of the cruise we saw 35 different whales!

Mahalo,

Claire

Captain Claire’s Humpback Fact of the Day: Researchers have observed that Humpback calves are very playful, investigating all kinds of objects in their environment (including our boat), interacting with their moms, and even interacting with passing pods of dolphins. But for as many calves as we see in Hawaii during the winter, we never have observed the calves playing with each other. Though we’re not sure why this is, perhaps Mom won’t allow a calf that isn’t hers to approach because she doesn’t want to feed the wrong one.