Wed July 15 – Whale Watching

Another great day with 3 species of cetaceans!

We left the dock at 2PM, with a mild haze in the air, but good visibility and headed out to where we’d been seeing whales and had reports of their presence. Of course, on our way out we found a small pod of Tamanend’s bottlenose dolphins in water that was 102′ deep . With lots of prey in the surface layer, we expected more dolphins and within 40 minutes, we had 60-100  dolphins around us in every direction. We began to see blows off in the distance. The 20′ tall inverted cone-shaped blows of finback whales and the 15′ billowy blows of humpback whales were ahead. As we headed towards the blows, an aggregation of ~100 Short-beaked common dolphins swam to us and briefly rode our bow wake(a common behavior that let’s them spend less energy by being pulled along in our draft. We eventually reached the humpback whales. This was an associated trio including Wizard (a female we’ve seen often since 2012) and Rapier (another female that we last saw off Montauk in 2024). The third humpback was a calf. We’ve learned that both females had calves this year and are awaiting further ID as to who’s calf this might be. Humpbacks here are members of the West Indies population, one of the 9 out of 15 populations globally removed from the IUCN Endangered Species list in 2016. We’d eventually run out of time and had to return to the dock while moving into the thick orange haze of Canadian wildfire smoke. All photo taken with Nikon Z8 and Nikkor Z180-600MM lens. All WhaleSAFE, MMPA, and ESA protocols were followed.

60-100 Tamanend’s bottlenose dolphins

~100 Short-beaked common dolphins

3 humpback whales

23 Wilson’s Storm-Petrels

48 Cory’s Shearwaters*

113 Great Shearwaters*

3 Sooty Shearwaters*

1 Manx Shearwater*

*List compiled and shared on eBird by Ken and Suzy Feustel

Photos will be available soon at https://drartiek-cresli.smugmug.com/CRESLI-2026-Whale-Watches/2026-07-15 Montauk-Whale-Watch