This morning we had another present on our anchor to deal with before we could leave our beautiful Honeydew Cove. All the prettiest spots seem to come with kelp!
All the finger-crossing and whale-dancing we did this morning to conjure the whales today worked!!
There were SO many whales out in Frederick Sound after we rounded Pinta Point. Several large groups…some breaching and some tail-slapping and fin-slapping…it was hard to know where to look (or where to aim!) We opted to aim for the largest group, for the most potential to see some bubblenet feeding.
I was able to get IDs for a bunch of them, and many whales we’ve never seen (or ID’d) before.
This next one is super interesting. Happy Whale ID shows it to be a female named Bauxbaumia, SEAK-0517, first spotted in Alaska in the summer of 1977. That’s 48 years ago!
But another interesting thing is that she dove a few times with a calf right at her side! I found no mention of a calf of hers on Happy Whale — it’s maybe rare but not unheard of for a whale her age to have a calf. Super cool!
The bubblenet feeding kept happening and I kept missing it or just getting the tail end…still cool though.
More IDs from Happy Whale:
There was a small boat floating around with us watching the whales, and they were headed a little more south when this happened:
It was for sure close, but my long lens and very compressed depth of field makes it look REALLY close (and those whales look ENORMOUS).
This one in the above and below photo, is called Chocolate Chip Cookie, SEAK-5117.
In these next two shots my exposure was super wonky and the color was off, but they were sharp so I made them black and white instead:
As we were just about to continue south, the whales surfaced right near Turnagain.
What an awesome day! T-shirt and shorts weather, breaching and bubblenet feeding humpbacks everywhere we looked…perfect!
The whales dispersed and so we continued on to Portage Bay. We’ll anchor here for the night and then continue into Petersburg tomorrow.
The four of us gathered on the flybridge of Airship this evening for happy hour and to enjoy maybe the last sunny day for a few days…making the most of all of it!!
Cheers!
Oh, and later in the evening we got a text from Turnagain to check out the moon! Kevin grabbed my camera and shot a few nice pics of it:
