While it has been two years since we’ve been on the Cape for vacation, it has been at least three years since we’ve driven up to Provincetown and gone on a whale watch. We always ride on a Dolphin Fleet boat as they are staffed by naturalists and are actively doing research on every whale watch they conduct. Though yesterday was cool and breezy and quite cloudy with ocean swells in the 5 to 8 foot range, they decided to head out quite far to the East side of the Stellwagen Bank to watch the whales feeding. Due to the cloudy day, the fish (sand eels) that the humpback whales feed on were really near the surface (within 50 to 100 feet or so). This resulted in the whales making only shallow dives to go down for feeding and not showing us too much tail! But, they also were lunging up out of the water with their mouths full of fish and actually completely breaching the water — as in leaping out of the water COMPLETELY. You haven’t seen a fish jump until you have seen an adult humpback whale leap out of the water. They only did this once the boat had left the immediate area they were in, so I didn’t capture any photos with the camera — just with my memory.
Here are some “shots” from the day
— the humpbacks were often quite close to the boat and there were often more than one at the surface — I left this one un-cropped so that you could see how close to the boat it was
— sometimes they did do a deep enough dive to show us their tail’s underside — each humpback whale has a distinctive marking on the underside of his/her tail by which they can be identified
— lots of photos snapped (yeah for the world of digital cameras) as this whale was with us on the surface for a while, then was going, going, gone
