Wednesday's Atlantic Queen Trip

After a couple days of time in the office, in the heat and humidity, I was very glad to be out on the boat this afternoon!  Minke and fin whales were plentiful today. We got some great looks at a minke whale early on in the trip.

Then we moved on to the big ones!  We had good looks at 4 fin whales, with at least a couple more in the 

area that were in the distance.  

At one point, a fin whale came up right off the bow, and we got great looks at its beautiful, swirly gray chevron, a marking we can use to tell individual fin whales apart.  

When we first found the whales, we had all 4 of them in a line, swimming one behind the other - a pretty spectacular sight... probably at least 160 tons of whale in front of us!  Since each of these whales was probably at least 60-65' long, I couldn't get a picture of this line-up, but it was pretty impressive. After that, the whales started swimming in all directions, and behaving very erratically, so it was hard to predict where they would come up. They didn't seem to be diving far, though, and we got evidence of feeding in the form of a giant patch of whale poo (it's the little things that makes scientists excited....)

Here's a picture of a gigantic fin whale with some little Wilson's storm petrels (see the 3 of them near the bottom?):

Here's another shot.  Although we have a catalog of hundreds of identified fin whales who've visited Jeffreys Ledge, I haven't identified any of these yet, but maybe some of my colleagues can after we take a closer look at the images. We'll let you know if any of the whales were seen here before.

Thanks to all who joined us today, and congratulations to Zack, who won our raffle and an adoption of "Fjord," one of our favorite fin whales!

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