Updates of Whale Activity

It has been a busy few days and I finally have a moment to pass along our sighting reports to all our passengers as to what we've seen this week. Thanks for your patience as I know I promised to post our trips sooner rather than later. So here we go!


Tuesday morning brought a little bit of rain to the harbor but once we were underway we scooted out from the rain clouds and headed to a region of Jeffrey's Ledge about 25 miles from Rye Harbor. On our way out one of our passengers pointed out 5-6 harbor porpoise before we even passed the Isles of Shoals. These whales tend to be a bit on the "shy" side so we continued on our way but definitely pointed them out for everyone to take a look. Thanks to our offshore fishing friends we quickly became surrounded by whales of all sizes once we got near the Ledge.

Turns out we saw at least 9 different Fin whales (most likely more but our naturalist Beth took pictures for photo-identification purposes that need to be organized and distinguished between all our whales in the area), 3 different Humpback whales and 1 Minke whale.

One of the many exciting sights we saw were two different groups of Fin whales moving around together. One group had 3 adults and one group had 4 different adult Fin whales in this particular area of Jeffrey's Ledge! One of the whales in the group of 4 we were instantly able to identify as Prong, a Fin whale that was first seen in 2000. This photo shows two of the four Fin whales we saw at one point.

Our three Humpback whales for the day were Valley, Tigris and Satula. Valley and Tigris were actively feeding creating bubble clouds and coming up with their mouth's wide open. Chompy chompy as we fine folks with the Blue Ocean Society like to say! All these whales were concentrating on all the available food up for grabs. This photo is of Valley.

Wednesday was another action packed day with 2 Minke whales, 4 Fin whales, 4 Humpback whales, 1 Puffin and 1 Great Blue Heron all spotted on our morning trip. As Jen mentioned in her Blog Post, the amount of feeding actively taking place for so many passengers to witness has become almost normal routine (and by no means is this something commonly seen for the most part!) For those of you who have seen lunging Fin whales and open mouth feeding Humpback whales it is a spectacular event and something I hope you all remember for many years to come. Hopefully it will continue to be something so many people can have the chance of seeing and get a true appreciation for some of the other creatures we share this planet with.

This morning it was Tripod and Chromosome making the bubble clouds along with Tigris and a humpback yet to be identified in the area as well. It will be exciting to find out if this unknown whale is completely new to the area or is a whale that has some history with the Gulf of Maine. It may take some time to fully check our catalogs and consult other research groups in the New England area before we make a positive ID.

The afternoon trip provided a feeding frenzy from 2 of the 5 Fin whales we saw. We also found 2 Humpback whales (Tripod and Chromosome again!) still going strong and chowing down on food. 2 different Minke whales were also spotted during our adventure.

Today was an adventure on it's own accord. This morning we were treated to winds stronger than what was predicted and Mother Nature decided to throw some fog into the mix as well. While the fog made our visual abilities a bit more challenging we by no means gave up hope. Our eyes were constantly in search of a sign of whales nearby and turns out we found an awesome Fin whale inside of Jeffrey's Ledge. This whale was taking less than 4 minute dives (typical dive intervals can last 10-12 minutes long sometimes!) and circling around the area making our chances of staying with this animal that much greater. It also helped having some fantastic whale spotters on the bow pointing out to everyone where the whale was coming up to breathe! Thanks kids :) Even with the fog we continued further offshore to see what other animals we could find.

Our trip rounded out when we got a quick glimpse at a Minke whale before running out of time to search other areas of the Gulf of Maine for more marine activity. Coastal winds have kept us on land for this afternoon but we eagerly await for our departure again out toward Jeffrey's Ledge.