2 pm Whale Watch - Krill
We had an amazing day offshore with at least 25 surface feeding humpback whales. The fog kept coming in and and out reducing our visibility to less than 100 feet at times over the course of our trip. But that didn't stop the whales from feeding right next to our boat.
We were able to identify quite a few of our humpbacks and I want to thank our captain, Capt. Jonny, and our interns Kate and Kelsey from the New England Coastal Wildlife Alliance for helping out. Our captains and interns are very good at identifying individual humpbacks using the markings on their body including the fluke pattern. Great team effort.
Here are the humpbacks that we were able to identify so far: Ventisca, Etch-a-Sketch, Blackhole, Eruption, Ganesh, Anchor and calf, Rapier and calf, Circus and Division.
The star of the show was Rapier's calf who was doing every type of active behavior in the book! This little calf has a lot of barnacles on the underside of its fluke. Mom even has a large number of barnacles on her fluke and this is new for her. Not sure what this signifies, but it doesn't bother the whales in any way.
Rapier's calf was tailing breaching, lobtailing, inverted lobtailing and rolling over. You had a feeling that this little animal was just having a good time while mom was feeding at the surface. What a sweetie! We also had sightings of Northern gannets (juveniles) and sooty shearwaters. Many more shearwaters are showing up in our area now, especially with surface feeding whales.
