July 6th, Granite State

We started the morning in an area of Jeffrey's Ledge about 20 miles from Rye harbor. Our first large whale of the day was an adult Humpback named Sloop, an adult female, first seen in 1987. Here she is photographed below.

Throughout our morning, we saw several Fin whales and Humpback whales within our area, but felt a little disoriented because all the Fin whales were charging around and changing directions quite frequently, and it made for a confusing time. It can get overwhelming when their are a lot of whales around, especially when you are trying to figure out who's who and you can start to lose track quite quickly sometimes. We were able to get good looks at mostly all the whales we saw, but our highlight of the morning had to be spending time with a pair of Humpback whales, Sabot and her calf. At one point, Sabot's calf became curious about the boat and came in for a closer look. Baby whales are just so cute!

Sabot did not stay to far away, keeping a close eye on her young baby! It was a great way to end our morning trip and we were looking forward to getting back out to Jeffrey's Ledge!

During our afternoon trip we found several Humpback whales, including Sloop and Flicker. As we spent time with them, we were also looking around the area for some of the Fin whales that were sighted earlier in the day and to our surprise, we couldn't find any of them. We have no idea where they travelled off to, but that sometimes happens when you work with wild animals. These whales are always on the move in search of food. I always try to tell people that every trip is truely a new experience and that sightings can change very quickly and this was definitely the case between our two trips. However, the nice thing was that we were able to relocate Sabot and her calf and during our time watching them, the calf became very active along the surface. The calf tail breached, chin breached, and full body breached several times. There are many theories behind these rare behaviors, but no one knows the exact reason why it occurs.

Sabot's calf seem to be very playful, which sometimes happens with new babies. As you can tell, even calves make quite a big splash!

Thank you to all our passengers who joined us today.
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