July 20-21, 2023

Thursday:

What a great day to be on the water!  We departed with super calm seas and a light breeze and perfect whale watching conditions.  Our first sighting was a pod of about 40 Atlantic white-sided dolphins. This pod included several calves swimming next to their moms – such a fun sight!  After watching the dolphins for a bit, we headed further offshore and headed toward a blow. We were waylaid by a humpback whale who lazily raised its flipper in the air. We went over to check it out, and it turned out to be Spoon! She was in a sleepy mood, spending most of her time at the surface, appearing to nap.  We didn’t want to disturb her, so we headed further out and saw several more humpback whales. The whales were charging around and not spending a lot of time at the surface, but we managed to identify Satula, Jawa, Gondolier and possibly Chromosome.  We finished up by spending some time with Pinball and her calf.

 

The afternoon trip was similar, with different whale configurations. We started with a pod of Atlantic white-sided dolphins. These spent a little more time near the boat than the morning’s pod, and we got to see several dramatic leaps!  We then moved out to where we had humpbacks in the morning, and came upon a whale that we got a quick look at, but haven’t yet identified.  Spoon was still in the area and had met up with Chromosome, and we watched them for a bit.  We also spotted Satula again, Clamp and got some amazing looks at Pinball and her calf at the end.  What a day!

Friday:

We headed out towards the southern end of Jeffreys and encountered varying fog as we got closer.  On the trip, we had a small and elusive group of harbor porpoises before we ended up with a foraging finback whale. We got a couple of quick looks at the finback before we moved on to investigate other blows.  We spent time with several humpbacks, including Gondolier, Satula,  Pinball, and her calf.  Both Pinball and her calf breached for us and provided some amazing looks.  On the way back in we got some nice looks at the always bizarre Ocean Sunfish.

 

Satula

Pinball and calf

For the afternoon, we headed back to the same area for the afternoon trip.  6-7 miles west of our destination, we encountered the humpback whale Nike who was actively feeding at the surface.  Nike gave us multiple lunge feeding looks at the surface.  Totally hard to predict but awesome to witness.  Nike would lunge almost vertically through the surface, and we could see the water filling his ventral grooves.  Eventually, we continued East, where we had several dispersed blows.  While waiting for humpbacks to surface, we had a couple more glimpses of harbor porpoises. We got looks at Satula, Pinball and her calf, and an additional unknown humpback. As we left the area to return to Rye, we could see lots of white water and an active whale in the distance.