Wednesday, September 21, 2011 (12 pm trip, Leah)

12 noon whale watch - Leah

Today we started our absolutely beautiful day off with Gladiator, a humpback whale who was welcoming us into Stellwagen Bank by flipper slapping. Then Gladiator would dive for varying lengths of time then come back to the surface and continue flipper slapping. I'm not really sure if Gladiator was feeding while we were watching but was definitely having fun giving us a run around the area.

After that our attention was stolen away by a breacher that was about 2 miles away and when we moved on to check out that humpback we found Lightshow, who was also going on long deep dives but was also feeding. Lightshow was mostly subsurface feeding, the only way we knew that was because of the mouth first surfacing that was occurring.There was even a small remnant of some bubbles rising to the surface and some fish trying to get out of the way of those bubbles but Lightshow kept feeding underwater. We didn't get to see any of the breaches up close but the distant sights were quite impressive.

Unfortunately, we also saw a very large amount of debris floating at the water's surface. Marine debris, especially our plastics, are one of the biggest hazards whales and other marine wildlife have to deal with. Recycling and reducing the amount of material we use in our day-to-day life is one small way we can all help reduce the amount of marine debris offshore.