whales

This was our whale watching cruise. We saw five, and got just a glimpse of one more.

Someone sees a spout, and the boat moves towards it. Then we wait for a minute or few for it to surface again. Another spout as it takes a breath. It moves a bit through the water, it's back humping. Its blowhole rolls under, and its hump comes up before it goes under. You wait another couple of minutes, and it come up for another breath. It does this a few times, and the last time, it takes a quick succession of breaths. It rolls forward, but its hump isn't as high in the water as usual. It keeps rolling forward and the tail comes up out of the water. It dives deep, and since it can stay down there for twenty minutes, you wander off looking for other whales.

This is the most common observed behavior. You may have heard of bubble hunting, spy hopping, tail slapping and of course, breaching. We didn't see any of that. Just the aforementioned diving.

We saw two whales when we were out on our Misty Fjords tour. I also got a glimpse of a pair of dall porpoises. These two photos were taken on our Evening Whale Watching Cruise. As I said, we saw six humpbacks, altogether. On this tour, we also saw some Steller sea lions lounging on a buoy. Those things get up to 2000 lbs, IIRC. We saw harbor seals on the whale watching cruise, and also from the ship a few times. We didn't see any orca or beluga.



And don't ask me how they sleep under that bell.