I had a bit of free time today just before I leave for home, so took up another whale-watching trip – this time out of Boston . There are about three whale-watching trip companies operating out of Boston city itself. As I didn’t have a reference point to whether one was better than the other, I simply took the one that ‘looked’ like the most established and comfy one with the New England Aquarium.
Unlike the Yankee Freedom Matt and I took off Gloucester, the Voyager III was a much more luxurious boat. There were much fewer whale watchers taking the trip this time too, as it was a weekday morning (when the boat returned, there was a long queue for the afternoon session).
Everything looked really promising, compared to the choppy madness at sea and hours of fruitless searching for whales from the earlier trip. The weather this time was just perfect, the sky was a glorious blue, and waters were reasonably calm. We ran into the first pair of whales just an hour out of the harbor (compared to the more than three hours it took before we had our first sighting off Gloucester). In fact, I think we saw about eight whales in five different sightings altogether in the Stellwagen Bank.
However, all the whales did this time was to blow and do lazy dives. No breaching, no flipper slaps, no fancy tricks – though on one occasion one of the humpbacks came pretty close to our boat at about 10 meters close.
It brings to mind what some of the experienced watchers shared in the earlier Gloucester trip. That while we were tremendously unlucky to have scouted around for so long before the first sighting, that we saw a mother humpback and her calf as a pair, and that she was teaching her baby breaching was very special. So much so that it was worth the agony of the outbound trip itself, even if we didn’t realize then how lucky we were to have seen whales breaching and doing flipper slaps.
So, here’s one series of pictures taken of one of the sighted whales doing a lazy and slow dive during the Boston outing. I was a lot better prepared this time too. Ditched the polarizer, dialed a minimum shuttle exposure time of 1/800s, braced myself better against the boat railings and shot in JPG instead of RAW. So, the shots this time were pristine in quality – just no breaching.:(
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