After canceling yesterday’s trips due to high wind and seas, we weren’t sure what to expect today. We were happily surprised by the calm ocean with barely a ripple on the surface. We traveled to the southern end of Jeffreys Ledge and found several humpback whales! We also found dozens of tuna boats in the same area. This made our maneuvering a bit tricky as we didn’t want to upset their lines or throw a big wake if any of them had a fish on the line! Although the humpback whales were moving around quite a bit, we could identify three of the four: Diablo, Ravine and Clamp!
As we were deploying our CTD instrument (that measures salinity, temperature and depth of the water) a large grey seal popped up close by! And on our way home, we passed by some harbor porpoises, a possible blue shark and a very nice ocean sunfish!
This afternoon, we took a different course to southern Jeffreys. Our first sighting was another ocean sunfish!
Soon after, we cruised past a small harbor seal before seeing some splashing in the distance. This turned out to be a pod of Atlantic white-sided dolphins!! We haven’t seen many dolphins so far this season so this was a special treat!
But it got even better! A huge fin whale surfaced just outside the pod! After checking out this fin whale, we went back to the pod for a few more minutes.
We spent time with two more fin whales before arriving at the tuna fleet.
Here, at least four humpback whales were scattered throughout the area, some of which were surface feeding! Our first humpback was Diablo again, and the second was Dyad!
Today was picture-perfect!
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