A whale of a good time

Another thing I didn’t expect was the sheer quantity of non-game ocean life. Every day we’d see something new like pilot whales, dolphin, sea turtles, manta rays, seals and unique birds.
The first major sighting was a pod of probably 40 pilot whales that appeared over the horizon, just cruising along in the distance. We fired up the boat and drove so that we’d be in their direction of travel, and then stopped and waited. We were awestruck to hear and see them get closer and closer until about 20 off the bow, when the closest one slipped under the boat and popped up about 50 feet away on the other side while the others just glided around us. Wikipedia says they get to be 20 feet long and weigh 3 tons, and that is enough to make you kind of hunker down in the boat a little and hold on to something just in case…

On the last day, we were able to get pretty close to some huge finback whales, which was just awesome. We could see the spouting mist from a long ways away, and Rick thought that they might be finback’s. Sure enough, as we got closer, the water would start looking funny in a big 25’ patch and then this head and back would just kind of roll up and forward through the water. A big exhale and inhale right before the blowhole went underwater and then the back of the whale would just keep coming and coming. Finally a little shark looking fin and the top of the tail would slip under the water and they’d be gone for another minute or two. Wikipedia lists an average length of 65ft, and I believe it. Suddenly the boat feels really small.


We got some decent video of the pilot and finback whales, and I’ll post it here when I get a chance to shrink the file size. Here are some other random seaworthy items.