Wed July 24 – Whale Watching

100 bottlenose dolphins to start, humpback and more bottlenose to end

When we start our whale watch trip with unlimited visibility on sunny dry afternoon, we have great expectations. We hadn’t even gotten past the Lighthouse when we found a massive aggregation of inshore bottlenose dolphins – over 100!  We watched and followed as they were chasing their prey, driving them into tight circles and then diving. Adults, juveniles, and new born calves were all around us.  What a beautiful sight.

We left them to continue their journey and ours, and headed towards where we had been seeing humpbacks whales for the past few weeks. We found a good sized humpback and stayed with it, observed it, photographed its dorsal fin and flukes for ID purposes. We were in neutral and ready to leave but the whale had other plans, it decided to swim right up next to us, along the port sight, then under us, and come back on the starboard side. Needless to say, we couldn’t move until the whale moved away.  Nobody complained.

We headed a bit further offshore and began to encounter pelagic birds, rafts of Cory’s shearwaters, a few Great shearwaters, and a few aggregations of Wilson’s storm petrels too. Shortly thereafter we found a pair of whales swimming together. As we found a few weeks ago, these whales, staying right next to each other were not mom and calf, as you might expect, but of similar size (about 36 feet (11  meters). We were able to stay with them for quite some time and got great photos, videos, and recollections.  Again, almost nobody on board had seen whales or dolphins before and were just as happy as can be.

Totals:

115 Bottlenose dolphins

3 Humpback whales

25 Cory’s shearwaters

2 Great shearwaters

10 Wilson’s storm petrels

1 immature Northern gannet

Photot – https://drartiek-cresli.smugmug.com/

Arthur H. Kopelman, Ph.D.