Two more awesome trips in the books! We encountered a Humpback and over a thousand Common dolphins throughout the day!
To start our morning trip we set out in nice calm glassy waters to the north west. We caught up with a solo humpback whale cruising slowly to the south. Our first look was pretty awesome, as it popped up in front of us so we watched it cross our bow! It came up for 3-4 breaths with 9-10 minute dives. We were lucky enough to see its tail every time it went down for a dive. After spending some time with it, we waved goodbye and set out to search for more wildlife to the west. We spotted plenty of birds, but none were really feeding. We enjoyed a nice smooth ride in.
On the afternoon trip, we set out to the west and heard there was a whale in the area only a few miles from shore. We looked around but never saw any signs of it. We had pretty good visibility and nice sea conditions but it gave us the slip! That’s what happens with wildlife sometimes, you can never predict where they will be. While searching for the whale we noticed some major bird activity to the west of us, and continued out there. We hit the dolphin jackpot! The pods of Common dolphins were spread out but amazing! Some of the energetic ones, raced over to come ride the bow and surf in our wake! There were thousands of birds of many different species feeding alongside the dolphins too! We noticed a massive bait ball that was about 40-ft long! The fun didn’t stop there, on our way in, for our grand finale, we spotted a fast-moving pod of Long-beaked Common dolphins that were headed north! They were pretty incredible! We noticed many of the dolphins were mostly large males — the largest bachelor pod I’d ever seen!
We will be back tomorrow with more updates, stay tuned!
Naturalist,
Vanessa
