Tag Archives: dolphins

Dolphins surround a Whale

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Aloha,
Monday’s wintery weather caused us to cancel all our cruises except for Breakfast with the Whales. The 16 guests who braved the conditions with us were rewarded though, as we started the cruise with a pod of about 100 Spinner Dolphins — many of whom decided it would be fun to surf our bow wake. As we were watching all this activity, a Humpback surfaced right in the middle of the pod. Then we saw some breaching a way’s off, so Captain Baker decided to head out that way. We were surprised when 3 whales surfaced at our stern and made a dive right below us (we could see them as they cruised right under us). And we finished the cruise with even more breaching.
Mahalo,
Claire
Captain Claire’s Humpback Fact of the Day: Though we’ve mentioned before that only male Humpback Whales “sing”, all Humpbacks make noises and apparently use these sounds to communicate with each other. Researchers have witnessed cooperative feeding behaviors among the Humpbacks apparently “triggered” by sound, and have also witnessed Humpback Cows (moms) apparently ignoring some sounds made by their calves (researchers called these sounds “goo-goo, ga-ga” noises), but responding immediately when the calves made particular squealing noises. So it appears that Mom recognizes her baby’s voice!

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.