Sunday's Atlantic Queen Trip

Just another gorgeous day on the water... I keep saying that lately, but the heat on land is pretty unbearable some days this summer, and this weekend, it was just perfect on the boat.  A nice, cool breeze and calm seas made whale watching a perfect activity for this hot afternoon!

We traveled a ways today - but I didn't mind too much given that it was such a gorgeous day and we had great passengers on board with lots of good questions. It was fun to see familiar faces, too - like Kimberly and Paula, who always seem to bring us good whale luck!

We started out our sightings with a pod of about 20-30 Atlantic white-sided dolphins, who were very active and fun to watch as they cruised along our bow.

Atlantic white-sided dolphin

Listening to radio reports, we determined that heading south was our best course for the day. We went to southern Jeffreys and found 5 humpbacks!  There were several other whale watch boats there, too, but despite that, the whales spent plenty of time on the surface and we got great looks at two of them - "Vault," a 2-year old whale that is the offspring of Cajun, and a whale we haven't ID'd yet. We even got to see some flipper-slapping from one of the humpbacks in the distance!

Our As-Yet-Unidentified Humpback - this whale was also seen on 7/11/10

 Vault -it's a blurry image, but you can see the distinctive notch in Vault's right fluke, and the line on the right side of the tail that is another distinguishing feature.

As you might know, we spend a lot of our time at Blue Ocean Society educating people about trash. So it was sobering to see several pieces of trash around these endangered humpback whales, including a plastic bottle (which could take 450 years to break down) and a plastic wrapper. Someday, hopefully we'll be able to prevent this trash from getting out in the ocean in the first place.

 Plastic wrapper several miles offshore

Other than that, it was just about a perfect day on the water - we had lots of bluefin tuna jumping, adding to the excitement, along with several bird species (greater and sooty shearwaters, Northern gannets, Wilson's storm petrels, and gulls).

We had a lot of folks who helped our cause by purchasing Blue Ocean Society merchandise on board, and we thank them for their support. Thanks to all who joined us - just by coming aboard, you're helping whales!  We hope to see you again soon!

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