Steve's Whale One - Photo of the Day
26 July 2007
Well what an amazing day we've had out here today!
Welcoming on board the crew from Channel 9's "Saturday Afternoon" and Matt Basil (recipient of the Steve Irwin scholarship) from Shedd Aquarium we were pumped for an awesome day and we well and truly got it!
Straight out of the harbour mouth we came across a large pod of Indo pacific humpback dolphins (Susa dolphins) and knew we were in for a great show.
About 10 nautical miles east of Point Cartwright we powered into the whale highway to be greeted by a very enthusiastically breaching young male who only stopped breaching to wave his pectoral fin and wave us over into his direction. This massive whale was breaching continuously off the bow of the boat slowly getting closer and closer until those of us standing on the bow almost got wet it was so close!!!
His partner was a slightly less energetic and we noticed with one of her fluke up dives that large chunks at the edges of her tail fluke were missing (possibly an earlier altercation with an Orca) so that she obviously had to work a lot harder to swim this marathon migration let alone breach!
Soon after we discovered what all the fuss was about as another pod of two whales came in from the starboard side headed straight for us (and of course the other pod) and the affiliation, or the coming together of two pods, caused a little lull in activity on the surface as all four whales disappeared right under the boat to check each other out.
We continued on to the south in search of more whales leaving these animals to get to know each other and found another pod of whales playing with some bottle nose dolphins off the bow of the boat.
All in all it was a fantastic day with great sea conditions and unbelievably acrobatic whales (as you can see Karlos' amazing photo attached) and the sought after close encounter... and you'll see it all on "Saturday Afternoon next weekend August 4th 5.30pm on Channel 9!
Hope to see you all on board someday soon
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