On Wednesday’s Wake up With the Whales, we got to see a competitive pod of 5 whales charging around on the surface. We saw a few head lunges from this pod and heard lots of heavy breathing. We also saw some breaches from different Humpbacks a bit further out. On our 10:00 Cruise from Kawaihae we got to see two different cow/calf pods. We haven’t seen very many calves yet this year, so these whales were a welcome site. And what was even more welcome was when baby did a full breach right next to our idling boat…followed by a full breach from Mom! You should have heard the yells of excitement coming from the boat…incredible. We also got a chance to deploy the hyrdophone and were able to hear lots of singing, but one whale’s voice really stood out – this guy must have been really close by. And finally, on our Whales and Cocktails Cruise, we had to have seen more than 20 different whales, and boy were they active. We watched whales breaching in all directions, and some of them were just 200 yards from the boat. We also saw some pec slapping…but it was the breaches that had us yelling for more! A lot of these whales were really big adults, but we did see a Mom/Baby pod, and even baby got in on all the excitement doing a breach of his own.

Mahalo,

Claire

Captain Claire’s Humpback Fact of the Day: The gestation period for a Humpback whale is about 11 months, which means the calves we’re seeing this year were conceived last winter. We can only estimate the gestation period because oddly, researchers have never observed the same female mating and then giving birth (in fact, there has never been documented observation of any humpback copulation or calving at all)!