Fri Aug 29 – Whale Watching
Another special day on the water with dolphins, whales, and cold winds
If you were itching to escape the heat and spend you time looking for dolphins and whales, Friday August 29, was your day. While we’d been traveling east for the past few weeks and finding whales, the presence of Atlantic menhaden in the near shore waters, as well as the mixing in response to Hurricane Erin has changed our potential searching paradigms. We had reports of humpbacks being in the nearshore waters and went to explore. First we found a group 60-70 Tamanend’s bottlenose dolphins in addition to a few pelagic birds (Cory’s shearwaters and an occasional Wilson’s storm petrel and Great shearwater. We continued westward and our Senior Naturalist/Scientist, Dr. Artie Kopelman, saw the splash of a massive whale breach miles ahead. We never found the reported breachers(s) but did find our first humpbacks, an associated pair. It was beautiful to watch them come over to check us out, non the port side and one on the starboard side of the bow, as we were floating still, Moments of AWE.
Eventually, we decided t leave them and held elsewhere. We ended up encountering more Tamanend’s dolphins and another resting humpback whale. Even after doing this for 37 year’s it new gets boring. Exhausting yest, but boring no/
Join us, we have a few trips left before we switch to seals./ Oh yeah – there was an Atlantic Gray seal in the harbor.
PLEASE NOTE THAT SOME OF THE PHOTOS HAVE BENN EDITED TO PROVIDE CLARITY. Our usual settings were inadvertently altered and have to be corrected via software
- 250 Tamanend’s bottlenose dolphins
- 4 humpback whales
- 108 Cory’s shearwaters
- 85 Great shearwaters
- 10 Wilson’s storm petrels
Photos will be posted at 2025-08-29-Montauk-Whale-Watch – CRESLI Photos from the field