Happy Friday!

What a day today. For those of you who took the chance to go in search of whales on Jeffrey's Ledge today you all got a chance to witness some amazing cetacean behaviors. We found Minke whales popping up in every direction this morning. We found one Fin whale this morning and headed back to the same area this afternoon and found two Fin whales. One of these Fin whales is a whale is named Fjord who was first seen back on the Ledge this year on May 17. Fjord has a very distinct dorsal fin which helps in individually identifying fin whales we see in our summer season. Perhaps one of the coolest things we saw today was when Fjord went charging through the water, called lunging, in order to capture a large amount of food in it's mouth. When a fin whale lunges the amount of white water it creates is incredible. Fjord actually turned on it's side, plowed through the water with it's mouth wide open, and went after the enormous amount of schooling fish we saw in the water today (I attempted to get a picture of all the fish at the surface, didn't come out as well as I had hoped.) What was really impressive was that we saw half of this fin whale's tail sticking up out of the water while Fjord was doing this feeding behavior. Very rarely do people get a chance to see a fin whale's tail (they typically won't raise their tail when going on a deeper dive like some other whale species) so it was a special treat for our passengers on board today.

We also found it a bit interesting that this morning we found two Humpback whales, Valley and Quote, moving around together. This afternoon however, both whales were still in the area but were "hanging" out with different whales. Valley was seen making bubble clouds and open mouth feeding with another Humpback whale we have yet to match up with our catalog. Quote was not too far away also open mouth feeding with the Humpback Sabot. Nice to know these whales were spending lots of time in this one particular area, which made sense with so much food nearby. Being wild animals you never really know where whales might travel or do when you are watching them and so it was intriguing to see the same whales but doing different behaviors in a matter of hours.

We are all looking forward to heading back out to the Ledge tomorrow so bring your sunscreen and see you on the water!