June 21- Prince of Whales- Newburyport

Happy Summer Solstice! What an amazing Solstice it was too! Life was saturating the Ledge today...actually, we never really made it to the Ledge- most of the activity was inshore, giving us more time for watching, and less time for traveling. With flat calm seas, and barely a breeze we cruised out to an area that has been productive for the last few days. The image above show just a glimpse of the activity- birds, a fin whale surfacing, and a school of fish jumping at the surface!

That fin whale was feeding (likely on those fishes' friends) and continually circled its lunch. We got some incredible looks at this whale, who has been ID'ed as #0611 (please, suggest a name for this whale!!) based on the notches in its dorsal fin and chevron pattern behind the blowholes.

Fin whale # 0611

Here is an image of the fin whale surfacing close to us with its lower jaw expanded and completely full of fish and water!

As we continued on, our buddy Kevin found us a very nice basking shark! This was our first shark of the summer for the Prince of Whales! Basking sharks are the second largest species of shark and this particular one was about 15 feet long!

Basking shark- you can just see the tip of the shark's nose underwater, with the small white scar!

As we kept going, we came across a humpback whale! This was Doric, who was seen yesterday, and just like yesterday, Doric didn't feel the need to lift his/her flukes very often. Still we had some great looks at this 9 year old humpback!

Doric, the humpback

In the area near Doric, several fin whales were seen. Two of these were paired up and feeding, while a couple others were on their own. Here is one of them- check out the white lower jaw!! Cool!

On our way in, we stumbled upon a small pod of Atlantic white sided dolphins pictured below. These dolphins were pretty busy and kept changing directions but we were able to see their distinctive markings:








As an added bonus, we found a second humpback on the way home! This whale has not been id'ed yet but stay tuned for update! Certainly a wonderful day of wildlife viewing on the ledge today! Thanks to everyone for your enthusiasm and to Scott Middle School for coming out with us for another year!


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