Mon Aug 25 – Whale Watching
Not wanting to repeated the previous day’s effoprts, we headed out to investigate several different whale spotting territories and had success
The conditions were excellent, the visibility was limitted to around 5 miles at first, but opened up to at least 14 miles. We headed south soon found a scalloped hammerhead shark and a few pelagic (open ocean) birds, before we eventually found two humpback whales in an area where the depth was 125′ and their prey (most likely sand eels) were patchily distributed on the sea floor. One whale was ahead of us and one on our stern, Both dove several times before any photos were taken, both stayed down for anywhere from 8-15 minutes. After the “last” dive was at 15:00 minutes long and counting, and we’d unseccessful in getting photo ID’s, and had been with these whales for 27 minutes, we opted to leave and look for more. Away we went and the whales came up behind us after being down for 16 minutes.
We headed ENE for 2 hours before we found a mom/calf pair of finback (or fin) whales. The mom was enormous, probably near 80′ in length and the calf was obviously smaller, but large enough. They also had potential prey far down in and around the sea floor and were diving for around 3:30 on average. Throughout the trip we had birders on board, monitoring and attempting to count all birds, but particularly wanted to see pelagfic (open-ocean) birds. Their sightings are posted in E-bird and they documented 36 species! I’ve included their counts for our pelagic bir compoonent of his report. The trip was long, but rewarding for all involved. My sincerest thanks to the group of 4 birders who’s offshore trip with our friends and colleagues on the American Princess had been cancelled. Of course my thanks also go the Viking Fleet Captain (JR Gibson) and crew (John and Paulie), the 9 CRESLI voluinteers, andeveryone else on board (including the yellow warbler that hitched a ride back tpo shore with us)
- 1 Scalloped Hammerhead shark
- 2 humpback whales
- 2 finback (fin) whales
- 5 Parasitic Jaegers
- 320 Wilson’s Stom Petrels
- 13 Cory’s Shearwaters
- 141 Great Shearwater
- 1 Sooty Shearwater
- 1 Manx Shearwater
- 1 Sargasso Shearwater
- 2 Red-necked Phalaropes
Photos soon at https://drartiek-cresli.smugmug.com/CRESLI-2025-Whale-Watches/2025-08-25-Montauk-Whale-Watch