Tag Archives: breaches

Whales Everywhere on Tuesday Afternoon

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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.

Barnacles and Breaches

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Aloha,
We ran 4 Whale Watch Cruises on Tuesday, and to quote Captain Patrick (who was on Alala from Kawaihae all day), “there were LOTS of whales all around”. We saw multiple Mom/Baby/Escort pods, multiple unescorted Mom/Baby pods, multiple competitive pods, and even a couple of lone whales. On days like Tuesday, it’s difficult to keep accurate counts of the number of surface displays we saw, so instead of reporting them, we’ll just have to say we saw a little of everything throughout the day, including breaches, tail lobs, head lunges, and peduncle throws. When the whales approached us, we were able to see some interesting scarring on some of their bodies, and when we got lucky enough to see close-up fluke dives, we could actually see the barnacles living on the edges of the whales tails. We did deploy our onboard hydrophones throughout the day, and we got to listen in to all the singing and vocalizations going on underwater too.
Mahalo,
Claire
Captain Claire’s Humpback Fact of the Day: The barnacles called “Coronula diadema” live only on Humpback Whales, and they seem to prefer to live on areas of the whale where the water flow is consistent (chin and fins). Though researchers aren’t sure how the barnacle can even find a whale to live on, there is some speculation that because the barnacles are spawning during the winter in Hawaii, the whales here are swimming in “barnacle larvae soup”. When a whale swims by, those “baby” barnacles chemically sense it, and hop on where ever they can. They use their antennae as “feet’ and walk around the whale till they find a suitable spot (which can take quite a while… if the barnacle were the size of a person, the whale would be 20 miles long). Once they find a spot they like, they flip over and produce tube-shaped cavities in their shells that actually draw in prongs of growing whale skin, holding their position on the whale for life.

A Little of Everything

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Aloha,
We had a great weekend of Whale Watching. Since we ran a LOT of charters, I’ll just report on the highlights. On Friday’s Whales and Cocktails we were delighted to watch a calf breach more than 30 times in a row! This energetic little guy was accompanied by his Mom and an escort…later in the same trip we saw another Mom/Baby/Escort pod with another energetic calf. This time we got to see a lot of tail lobs and pec slaps from the baby. We also saw a couple of HUGE adult breaches from different whales.
On Saturday’s 10:00 Whale Watch we got to see a pod of two adult whales really interacting with each other. The smaller of the two was doing a lot of diving and then surfacing right next to the other whale. We also saw a cow/calf/escort pod…and then watched something really interesting. We found a Mom/Baby pod in about 25 feet of water just north of the Mauna Kea Beach Hotel. The mom was floating on the surface, and every 25 minutes or so, would take a few breaths. Baby was swimming around her fairly actively. Captain Matt had seen this pod doing the same thing for a couple of days, so he called the experts at the Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary who said that they had been observing the pod for a few days too. They assured us that this was natural behavior…most likely the adult was sleeping (or resting).
On Sunday, Captain Paul on the 10:00 Whale Watch Alala reports a “great show”  that started with a pod of Spinner Dolphins just outside of the harbor. We headed south on that trip and encountered 3 different Mom/Baby pods, only one of whom was accompanied by an escort. We did get to see a lot of breaching from one of the calves…and we also saw 2 adult Humpbacks we had never seen before. One of them had a split dorsal fin, and the other looked like it had two dorsal fins…one in the regular place, and one just above his flukes. Very interesting…we hope to get photos of these whales from one of our guests and if we do, we’ll post them on our Hawaii Ocean Sports Facebook page.
Mahalo,
Claire
Captain Claire’s Humpback Fact of the Day:  Humpback Whales don’t sleep as soundly as we do — if they did, researchers believe that they’d drown. Humans breathe in response to carbon dioxide build-up in our blood, but Humpbacks and other marine mammals have to keep part of their brain awake at all times so they remember to breathe. When a Humpback sleeps, he floats just under the surface of the ocean, and comes up to breathe every couple of minutes. We call this behavior “logging’ as the whale looks a lot like a floating log.