Whales were very much present as we saw 1 Minke whale and 7 Humpback whales during our trip today. Our first Humpback whale of the day was being extremely elusive. This animal was spending well over 10 minutes under the water and moving in completely random directions making it quite tricky to get a look at it. The few looks we did manage to get revealed that this whale most certainly had a rough go recently. Many linear indentations were seen on either side of this whale, a very real reminder of how susceptible all whales are to fishing gear. This whale had become entangled in gear at one point in its past (as the scars indicate) and is a lucky one to have survived the ordeal.
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| Our first whale of the trip (above and below). Those linear marks are due to previous line chaffing along the whale's body |
Since this whale was being difficult to keep track of and we did not visually seeing a definite reason to stay longer (if we saw or strongly believed it to still be entangled we would have stayed) we ventured off towards some of the other spouts we were seeing not too far away.
We ended up first spending some time with Valley and her calf. Turns out this pair had a few extra "friends" traveling around with them today. A small group of Atlantic white-sided dolphins were mixed in with this mother and her calf!
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| Valley and some tiny dolphin dorsal fins in front of her! |
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| Valley |
It was great to see such the spread of marine life size from the 6-8ft dolphins, to the ~20ft calf, to the 40-50ft adult Humpback whale!
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| Big mamma Valley and a few Atlantic white-sided dolphins |
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| Valley's calf |
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| Valley's calf current pigmentation pattern |
We spent some great time with all these creatures before the dolphins moved on in their own direction and the pair moseyed out of the area in their own direction. So we too head off in yet another direction to check out another pair of Humpback whales!
This second pair of whales was Nile and Trowel. The two ended up moving right towards Valley and her calf and at one point we had a pair of whales on one side of the boat and another pair of whales on the other side. Awesome!
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| Nile and Trowel |
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| Trowel |
With some nice looks at everything we decided to move on out of the area and do a little exploring before we needed to head for home. Weren't we excited to end our trip on yet another pair of whales. Touchdown and Ditto are still in the area!
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| Ditto |
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| Touchdown |
These whales were on the move together as we were all very excited to see both of these whales still in our area (check out September 25 for the full story of these whales!). It was a great end to a very nice day full of whales.
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| Ditto and Touchdown |
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