Today on board the Asteria for our 11am whale watch, Captain Joe lead us to the southwest corner of Stellwagen Bank. Once reaching the bank we found ourselves in some thick fog. Luckily our sister vessel, the Sanctuary saw whales and shared their location with us.
It is usually very tricky to find whales in the fog. We observed Pele, Cajun, Jabiru, and their calves. As the adults did some high fluking dives for some subsurface feeding, the calves stayed at the surface. This allowed passengers to watch whales for almost the entire trip!
At one point, our focus was quickly switched to an adorable harbor seal pup that popped up in our jet wash bubbles. We estimate the pup was only 3 feet long! Towards the end of the trip Cajun’s 15 Calf surfaced very close to the boat giving passengers a great look at its tubercles! Even though it was a foggy summer day, we had an excellent trip on the southwest corner.
— Hannah
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Today on board the Aurora with Captain Tom we made our way to the Southwest corner. As we began to approach the bank we also began to move in and out of pockets of fog. Luckily, before things got too foggy we found two groups of whales! Two humpbacks surfaced briefly off of our starboard side but we decided to head towards a group of 5 off of our port side. This group of 5 consisted of Cajun and her 2015 calf, Pele, and Jabiru and her 2015 calf. All 5 were travelling around fairly randomly and taking short dives.
However, this changed abruptly when Cajun’s calf started breaching and continued to breach throughout the rest of the trip! While the adults continued their pattern of short dives Cajun’s calf continued to breach and soon Jabiru’s calf joined in.
Both calves breached the entire rest of the trip, sometimes in tandem, which was certainly special for our passengers (although really hard to get a picture of—but we got the splash!). As we stayed with this group the fog continued to roll in and out until we had to turn around to head home-at that point it was hard to see 100 feet to either side!
It was an absolutely wonderful day out on the Bank!
—Annie W.
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