July 2, 2025

Overcast skies kept the UV index a little lower today, but always wear sunscreen!

This morning, we passed by some harbor porpoises and stumbled upon an ocean sunfish, showing off this “interesting” fish.

Then we saw a blow in the distance. The humpback whale wasn’t fluking often, but we could tell who it was just by the small propeller scars on its flank. Yurt! This whale was feeding on pogies (also known as menhaden or bunker) and surfaced close by a few times!

As we were heading to a reported sighting a bit further south, we were surprised to find a pair of humpback whales feeding on pogies at the surface! 

This pair was Tripod and Chromosome- the dynamic duo who were seen together often back in 2008, I believe. I’ll have to check my notes for the specific year. Not only were these 2 feeding together, but they were also being escorted by a dozen Atlantic white sided dolphins! Fantastic!

On our way home, we saw more blows ahead of us. Valley, Gremlin and Spika were moving around quite a bit, but we got good enough views of them to figure out who they were.

The afternoon trip was a little more difficult in finding the whales. We began our trip with some harbor porpoises, an ocean sunfish, bluefin tuna and a big basking shark! Not a bad start, but it took us quite a while to find a large whale. Eventually we found a humpback and were elated to see that it was Patches, the whale that adorns the cover of our brochure!

A sneaky minke whale was in the area, and then it was time to head home. But our day was not over yet! We found Valley again on our way home!

And then, the best sighting of the day (IMO) was a porbeagle shark rubbing on a branch! The shark was not at all deterred by our presence, and we watched it for several minutes, close to our boat! Sharks generally are pretty shy, so to see this one so close for so long was really quite a treat! I will attempt to share a video of the encounter soon, so check back!

The ocean critters are always surprising us!