Aloha,

Wednesday’s Whale Watches began with a very quiet whale who appeared to be asleep. As we’ve mentioned in previous posts, whales don’t fall into the same sound sleep patterns as humans because part of their brain has to be active at all times to prevent them from drowning…but this whale was definitely resting. Guests aboard our 8:00 Breakfast with the Whales cruise also got to see the other end of the activity scale when they encountered a very active Calf who must have breached 10 times in a row (it was too exciting to keep an accurate count) and as the grand finale, just as we were entering the bay on the way in, Mom gave us a full-on adult breach! We ran a couple of mid-day Whale Watches on Manu Iwa — seeing 9 whales on the first trip and 13 whales on the second. On the first trip, guests were treated to the sight of a very young calf resting on Mom’s rostrum and on the second trip, the highlight was a full breach just 25 yards from the boat! And on our 3:00 Whales and Cocktails trip, we saw more calves…one of whom really wanted to approach us, but Mom kept pushing him away. When we deployed the hydrophone, the sounds we heard were terrific.

Join Ocean Sports and experience the excitement of Humpback Whale Watching. Call us at 886-6666 ext 103 or visit www.hawaiioceansports.com to reserve your adventure today.

Humpback Whale Fact of the Day: According to researchers, the sleep process for a Humpback is most likely very similar to how their little toothed cousins, the dolphins, sleep. EEG readings from sleeping bottlenose dolphins show that the dolphins shut down half their brains at a time to rest. The active half presumably is monitoring breathing and perhaps scanning the surroundings for predators. Bottlenose dolphins sleep approximately 33% of the day, but stay asleep for only a couple of hours at a time.

Mahalo and Aloha,

Captain Claire