**Note: There are no non-whale photos in this post. Not one.**
We left our beautiful spot this morning and headed out into Frederick Sound assuming we’d see more whales, which we did. I got this cool shot of a nice white fluke, and our friend Andrea had an ID super quick for me (see photo caption).
The further we went, the more whales we saw…HUGE groups of them together! We had to slow up and divert several times to avoid them, but finally came upon a large group bubblenet feeding together, so we decided to hang out and watch. This group had maybe 20 whales and they were SUPER active….breaching and tail and fin slapping, and of course bubblenet feeding. One breached VERY close to Airship but this is all I managed:
Here’s one that’s a little sharper (and a little further away):
And here are some of the others:
The thing about watching whales, is that you can be perfectly far away from them, right at the edge of what the long zoom lens will do, and they will suddenly pop up closer than you imagine they would, and then you can only fit about 5 of the 20 or so of them in your shot:
And then afterwards, they all headed toward our boat, getting pretty dang close before they dove beneath it. Exhilarating, yes. We were just floating at this point (no propeller movement) as they went around or underneath. Certainly made for some breath-holding photos, for sure (because of both the excitement of it, and the fish-breath we were downwind of)!
SUCH a great day!!
Here’s a brief video with some footage Kevin took while I was clicking away:
We’re now anchored in Portage Bay (which is fine, but not nearly as scenic as where we’ve been). We may put a crab trap or two down and see what we can scare up.
I did submit a bunch of fluke photos and have got IDs now for 15 of them (thanks so much for the assist, Andrea!). I’m finding that being able to have the whales identified by their fluke patterns adds a whole extra “scavenger hunt” angle to already awesome whale-watching! 🙂 Happywhale.com didn’t have an ID for only two of the flukes we submitted. Pretty good overall! The whales I think I missed getting good fluke photos of were the really young ones because they’re fast divers!
While uploading photos here at anchor in Portage Bay, I thought I kept hearing whale spouting, so I checked my tabs to make sure the one with the video from earlier today wasn’t still open…I did this twice, before looking outside….where of course there were two humpbacks cruising past the stern of Airship in about 30 feet of water (maybe a mama and a calf). Of course! Because that’s how chock full today was of whales!
