June 21, 2012 Whale Watches

9 am and 2 pm Whale Watches - Joanne

9 am Trip

We left the harbor aboard the Tails of the Sea with very unseasonably warm temperatures, light winds and calm seas, and a haze offshore.  A few miles east of the Gurnet Lighthouse, we passed a minke whale and a sunfish.  We continued through the southwest corner, the middle of Stellwagen Bank (where we got a wonderful look at a seal eating a fish) and to the east, over 25 miles without another whale sighting!  

Coordinating our efforts with 5 other whale watching boats from 4 ports we covered miles and miles of water; we finally got word of a small group of minke whales on the southern edge of Stellwagen Bank. As we headed there, a pair of humpback whales was finally located. We got to the pair and discovered it was a cow/calf humpback pair (mom and baby); and while she had been seen the day prior, no one had yet to identify her, so we were happy to do it.  Diablo was documented as a new mom and brought our total for the year to 28 documented cow/calf pairs so far this season.  While she didn’t raise her tail out of the water, her calf threw its entire body, full breaching several times.  It came right next to our boat, swimming under our bow and around us, giving everyone on board a spectacular view of the entire outline of its body and glowing white flippers.

We were lucky enough to spend about 30 minutes with the pair, the entire time of which the calf was active at the surface, even as we headed towards port, it continued to breach off our stern.  Diablo’s calf is approximately 5 months old, having been born in the warm waters of the Caribbean during the winter. Stellwagen Bank is a feeding ground and a nursery for humpback whales.  Whales that are brought here as calves have a very high likelihood of returning due to a strong site fidelity to their mother’s feeding area.  Diablo and her calf with spend the next 4-7 months together and then the calf will be on its own, hopefully having learned everything it needs to survive.

2 pm Trip

On our afternoon trip, we travelled to a different location with a report of a few more humpback whales.  We came across a mature humpback named Hancock. Hancock was doing some bubble net feeding, coming up lunging through the water, giving us spectacular looks off the rorqual grooves extended.  Hancock was named for a ‘scribble’ on the right fluke reminiscent of the signature of John Hancock. Traditionally, whales are not given a name of a person or a name indicating gender, but this one slipped through.

Not far from Hancock, we had a cow/calf pair—Scylla and her 11^th known calf.  Scylla was born in 1981 to Istar and is the only other reproductive female documented in her lineage.  She has 10 documented siblings, and while her brothers Cloud, Littlespot and Tigris visit Stellwagen Bank occasionally they prefer more northerly waters.  In 2005, she was the first documented cow/calf pair in the Gulf of Maine having been sighted 41 days earlier in the West Indies, making the fastest documented migration of a mother-calf pair in the North Atlantic.  She is immortalized by a life size model at the National Aquarium in Baltimore.