Whale watching

Friday, December 18

Up early for the whale watching: it was a beautiful morning! I wore my long underwear, and then barely needed a sweater. Sea was calm while we were over the shelf, then, as soon as we hit deep water, we were in large round waves – not rough, but lots of rolling! We rode the catamaran out only a few miles – amazingly close to shore. Along the way we saw quite a few albatross along with lots of other birds. I actually got a photo of an albatross – though not of the really large variety, though we saw those, too.

The crew had a “sighter” on top, looking for “blows,” and stopped a couple of times to put down a microphone to listen for the sonar clicks of the whales – but in the end it was a passenger who made the first sighting of the spout. We pulled up next to a sperm whale who was floating on the top of the water, re-oxygenating himself before diving deep again to feed. Mostly only his back was out of the water, with his nose coming up every couple of minutes to blow. On a sperm whale, his tail hangs down in this rest position, and the blow hole is right at the top front of the nose. In retrospect, I’m not sure just where he was taking in the air - seemed to be mostly pretty much underwater, with only the middle 1/3 peeking above. Pretty cool even what we could see. We watched until he dove – tail in the air, then motored over to where we could see another blowing. Apparently it is somewhat unusual for more than one to be at the surface at one time, but there were 3 in our area. We got a really good look at two of them!