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Capt. Dave's Ocean ReportAs seen weekly in the The Breaching Fin Whale Returns! We saw offshore bottlenose dolphins and small pods of common dolphins
this week. We were following a nice pod of bottlenose up the coast one day this week when I saw a huge explosion of water going up in the air, about a mile and a half away - it was like someone had set off a depth charge. I called my friend Mike Bursk on the Sea Explorer, to see if he had seen it. He hadn’t but one of his crew had. So we both searched high and low for the phantom whale, that had obviously breached, but we never found it. I started wondering what kind of whale had made such a splash using the process of elimination I narrowed the field to just few like candidates and a most likely suspect.
We also saw one blue whale this week. And one elephant seal and one large Mola mola or giant ocean sunfish and it was a big one too. See photos: the first one was taken last month of this same fin whale’s huge splash as it breached right near our boat, and the second one is the same fin whale we saw again this week. That’s it till next week. God bless. This is Capt. Dave, over and out. ____________________________________________________________________ |
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Blue
whales never breach and gray whales are pretty much long gone.
Since it was such a big splash I guessed
it was most likely a fin whale but it could have been something
real unusual like a sperm whale or a humpback. The following
day I got what I believe is my answer: we found a fin whale!
But not
just any fin whale it was the one and the same fin whale we saw
about a month ago that had breached back then. He was recognizable
by me because he had some kind of a tag on his port side (you
can just make it out in the photo, its pink and about six inches
long)
and some distinctive marks that I had photographed the first
time we saw him. The following day we saw another fin whale and
a possible
cuvier’s beaked whale, (we never got a good enough look to
make positive ID), in the same area.