July 19 -- whale watching

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Now it's time for whale watching. This is what I wanted to do, more than anything else we did.

We had seen a whale the night before, but it was one of those "white ants on a rock, a mile away" type of sighting. We could see the blow fairly clearly, but the tail, well, that would have been one of those "You see the dark smudge? No, not that smudge, *this* smudge...." sort of images. I didn't even try to take any pics.

On the 19th, we rode on a catamaran, and could get much closer without disturbing the whales.

Right off the bat they found this one for us.

It was doing something relatively rare -- "lunge feeding" is when the whale comes right up through the surface of the water with its mouth open while feeding. This one did it for us several times.

They lunge, catch their breath for a minute or two, then dive to come up again.









When the captain said "we're going somewhere else now," our reaction was "But ... we are watching this whale!" Not that we said it where he could hear us, of course, but we were not eager to leave.

As the boat powered off to a new location, we ventured upstairs. Ah. No windowglare. One of the crew members told me he was excited. ?? He said that the captain only goes where we were headed when something Really Cool is happening. Well then.









The first thing we saw was that there were multiple whales at the new location (near the end of Admiralty Island).







They breathe, and then politely announce that they will dive by hunching their backs up above the water as they head for the bottom.







It was frustrating, even with the warning, trying to click at just the right moment to capture the tail, just so, above the surface, immediately before a dive.







Then I had a brilliant thought -- "The camera takes video!!!!!!" My new camera and my first camera (in my daughter's hands for the first time on this trip) take video. We switched to video, and caught us some whales.

If you poke around on YouTube, you'll find some much better video. Some from National Geographic, say. But this is ours and we were there to see what you see here.

These humpbacks are engaged in bubble-net feeding. This is a learned cooperative behavior. We were told that humpbacks do not live in groups, but sometimes come together to fish in this way. They dive down, and on the way up, they use sound, exhaled air bubbles, and their bodies to herd small fish into a tight column.

Then, all at once, they swim up through the column of fish with their mouths wide open, scooping up huge amounts of fish and water. They close their mouths, push the water out (their baleen acts as a strainer to keep the fish in their mouths), and then they swallow the fish.

They then swim on their sides for a bit (one fluke in the air). They rest, take a couple of minutes to breathe, then dive and do it again.












Of course still pics are nice, too. A close-up of the shore. Admiralty Island is excellent habitat for brown bears (as grizzlies are called, along the coast). In most places, one brown bear needs hundreds of square miles of habitat in order to thrive. On Admiralty Island, there is one bear per square mile. Since I got home, I've been looking over my Admiralty Island pics, to see if there were any bears lurking on shore that we didn't see at the time. So far I haven't spotted any.







Ok, back to the main event of the day.

The black and pink stripes are on the roof of a whale's mouth. The estimate from the captain was that there were 10-12 whales fishing together. I'm sure I see six open mouths here, and I believe there are at least three or four more whales in this pic.







Alas, we were only entitled to so much time, and had to go back.

We were so lucky!!! It was supposed to rain, and it didn't. They found us a whale right off the bat, which we watched through several dives. This group was bubble-netting, and another boat from this same company spotted them and called our captain, who rushed us down to see.

It was supposed to be a lot windier than it was, and if it's too windy, the catamarans can't go all that way down.

So -- we had perfect weather, allowing us to see something that is only seen on one of 50 or 60 trips.

Happy sigh.

One last tail.







Ok, if we have to go back, we have to.











In order to facilitate chronological traverse of these posts, a link to the next one is here.

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