Wed July 30 – Whale Watching

We headed out again to ostensibly cool off while looking for marine mammals. The relatively cooler water helped to curtain some of the brutal conditions and made things more comfortable than on land.  We had multiple reports of whales to the south and decided to head that way. As we traveled, we found a few pelagic birds and the numbers increased moderately, Cory’s shearwaters, then great shearwaters, and Wilson’s storm petrels. Eventually, we saw a humpback whale dive tdovetabout 350 yards ahead of us. This was a large individual, but the prey was in the upper 1/3 of the water column so the whale undertook a shallow, non-fiuking dive. We waited for the whale to resurface, but in the haze we must have missed it and after 15 minutes headed on. Our next sighting was of a massive finback whale (~75’) long. After a series of blows, it dove and we waited… 15 minutes and we must have missed this one also. The water had tremendous quantities of squid (a food of fin whales). We headed on and eventually 15 minutes later 1.3 miles from where we’d first seen the whale, it surface again swimming rapidly to the east.

Shortly thereafter, we began to encounter hundreds of short-beaked common dolphins, then more and more- an aggregation of ~300 individuals. These were enchanting encounters and everyone was elated to see  them.

1 humpback whale

1 finback whale

300 short-beaked common dolphins

25 great shearwaters

3 Cory’s shearwaters

230 Wilson’s storm petrels

Photos should be available soon