Today was a delight with calm conditions and very active whales. We came upon a large female with her calf of the year and another young whale right outside the harbor. We knew there were at least fifteen more whales only a mile or so further out, but decided to hang with these ones for awhile. Good choice. The youngsters were continually tail lobbing and rolling and pec slapping like they had all the energy in the world. It was especially nice as we had twenty high school students from Mountain View Waldorf School aboard. It is uncanny, but the last three high school classes on Sanctuary (all in the past two weeks) have had awesome encounters with young whales like this. We could not leave this trio, as every time we tried to sneak off, they came right up to the boat and swam under the bow, popping upon the other side to everyone’s delight. They topped off the three hour long play session with some spectacular breaches! It was another great day on the bay for sure.
Month: May 2014
Today was all about the lunge feeding humpbacks. Right out the gate we started tracking a few close in humpbacks that were on the hunt.
But they were not spending much time at the surface and seemed to be travelling. So we broke off and went to another couple of whales we noticed a mile or two to the SW.
We tracked them for a while and got into a nice rhythm. Then we started seeing Krill. At first we were seeing small balls. Then we came across an area that had krill for as far as we could see around the boat.
That’s when the feeding frenzy began. And it didn’t stop for 2 hours.