Sun July 27 – Whale Watching
A long, but utterly unique and successful trip with finback whale mom and calf, and some dolphins!
We travelled to an area that is one of the major whale feeding areas off Montauk and found nothing. We continued ENE for a while and turned to head back on a more northerly route, and then we saw the massive blow of an adult finback whale, and a faint blow of her calf! This is a new finback whale mom/calf pair for us, and what a pair it was! The calf kept swimming under and around our bow, then mom came up close to us. We were being “mugged” by both whales. These whales stayed so close to us that we could not move. Doing this for nearly 4 decades, I (Dr. Artie Kopelman, CRESLI president and senior scientist) have never seen a fin whale mom and calf do this for nearly 30 minutes, nor had our Captain (Dave Marmeno), in his many decades of whale trips. This was special! All100+ of us on board (passengers and crew) were ecstatic. We also were visited by a pod of about 30 short-beaked common dolphins while we were headed back. We got back to the dock almost 45 minutes late- but nobody complained.
- 2 Finback whales (mom and calf)
- 25-30 Short-beaked common dolphins
- 26 Great shearwaters
- 12 Cory’s shearwaters
- 200 Wilson’s storm petrels
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