12 pm Whale Watch with Tammy
What an amazing whale watch today! We traveled down the
backside of Cape Cod on this beautiful day. Our first two sightings were two
pairs of humpback whales. One of the pairs included a whale named Gladiator and
both animals in this pair were flippering for quite some time.
In this same area we also had fantastic
looks at two different minke whales.
As we looked around us we could see numerous blows, splashes and
circling birds to the east; all signs of feeding whales! We started heading in
that direction and on our way, we had a quick look at a single humpback whale
named Reflection as she fluked out.
Once we got to our destination, we confirmed that we did have a group of
feeding humpbacks! Six to eight humpback whales were surface feeding in groups
of 1, 2 and 3. We saw bubble net feeding, kick-feeding, lunging and straining.
Whales were coming up all around us with wide open mouths, giving us fantastic
looks at their baleen. Sometimes the whales would lunge below the surface, just
out of view, but we would see them charging up to the surface with water
streaming out of the mouth. In the
distance we even saw a chin breach and a full spinning breach!
We had two
additional visitors on our trip today: an ocean sunfish and a harbor seal! The
ocean sunfish (Mola mola) was
swimming (perhaps dangerously!) close to the feeding whales and we could see
the dorsal fin of the animal skulling back and forth. This fish looks to be
small, maybe around 4-5 ft; ocean sunfish have been reported to reach 10 ft in
length. The harbor seal made appearances on either side of our boat, just
popping it’s head out of the water and swimming for a bit on the surface.
Today’s trip was a real treat for everyone onboard; an incredible four species
day! Humpback whales identified include: Gladiator, Reflection, Putter,
Ventisca, Pleats, Thumper, Aswan, Sanchal, Longboard, Evolution.
