Wed July 17 – Whale Watching
It keeps getting better and better – another 4 species day with dozens of whales!
Once again, we headed out to sea and escaped the heat. The visibility was excellent in terms of distance, but hazy. It didn’t matter. Cap’t. Steven D. Forsberg radioed to tell us of “thousands of whales” offshore. It wasn’t thousands, but what dozens of whales, including finbacks and humpbacks. On the way, we found a large aggregation of short-beaked common dolphins. Later, we found the whales, we saw blows everywhere and in every direction. At any time, we were with a whale (or 4) we typically surrounded by an additional 20 more within a 1 nautical mile radius. Often times we were unsure which way to go and couldn’t move until the whales we were with moved away.
We found trios of humpbacks (mom/calf and escort) and had several finback whales swimming together as well. We also saw some Tamanend’s bottlenose dolphins on our way out. Lot’s of pelagic birds too.
What a day!
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~20-24 humpback whales
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~4-6 finback whales
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~100 short-beaked common dolphins
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~15 Tamanend’s bottlenose dolphins
