9/2/14

2014 Sightings | September 2

This afternoon we scoured Stellwagen for sightings. After lots of searching around the NW corner, we turned south towards the middle of the bank. We had great visibility, which was a plus, but it seems as though the activity from yesterday has travelled elsewhere. Luckily, we found a few humpback whales around mid-bank.

Draco's fluke

We spent most of our time with Draco and Lilium, a pair of bubble-cloud feeding humpbacks. They were taking about 4 minute dives and spending a good amount of time at the surface. At one point, Lilium made a bubble cloud right next to our boat! We stared at the cloud with anticipation, expecting the whale to surface just next to us. Lilium ended up surfacing about 30 meters away from the bubble cloud! What a trickster! Lilium was sighted over this past holiday weekend, but Draco hasn’t been since earlier in the summer! It was nice to see this whale back in the area! There were a few minke whales in the area today along with another humpback who was not fluking and wasn’t close enough to ID. Overall it was a beautiful morning out on the water!

Annie

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This afternoon we went to an area between the northwest corner and the middle of the bank where we found four humpback whales bubble net feeding! As soon as we pulled up Chairlift, Lilium, Draco and Pitcher all surfaced together inside the bubble cloud!

Chairlift's fluke

This quad then went onto subsurface feeding making increasingly longer dives. Eventually, Pitcher separated off and we spent the remainder of the whale watch with the other three humpbacks getting beautiful looks of their flukes with each dive.

A close-up look at a minke whale's coloration

Minke whale's glowing green "mittens" underwater

We also got to see a minke whale super close up and could see its glowing green mittens and head through the water! We saw more gannets out than usual today along with some great and Cory’s shearwaters! As we pulled into Boston, we watched an incredible storm move over the city and as we disembarked there was a beautiful rainbow to end our fantastic trip out to Stellwagen.

— Tasia

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