Our Tuesday morning started off pretty calmly. We operated our our Wake Up with the Whales Cruise on Alala from Kawaihae, and saw spouts from 5 different Humpbacks. One of them gave us a tail lob right near the boat. We got back to the harbor at 10:00, picked up some more guests and went right back out again. This time we saw a lot more…for about 15 minutes we watched a couple of adult humpbacks pec slapping and tail lobbing. We also got to see baby trying out his skills with some mini tail-lobs. And then for a grand finale, we saw both Mom and baby breach! And the highlight of our Whales and Cocktails was watching an adult humpback breach.

Mahalo,

Claire

Captain Claire’s Humpback Fact of the Day: In 1919, R.G. Meyers, who was working towards his PhD in Chemistry at Stanford University, conducted a chemical analysis of Humpback whale blood collected from the thoracic cavity of a whale killed in Monterey Bay. He found that the Humpback’s total cholesterol level was similar to a healthy human’s, but the glucose level was 4 times what’s considered a “healthy” level for a human. Since there are not a lot of carbohydrates in a Humpback’s diet, a Humpback’s liver and pancreas must work differently than ours.