We’d have to summaries this past week as being SPOILT for choice!!!The bay is really starting to fill up now!!! Even to the point that it’s hard to navigate through the swarm of submerged whales as they duck and dove between the vessel on each and every tour!
We were so excited to experience this season’s first humpback MUGGING (apart from our poor entangled whale)! An extremely inquisitive sub-adult could not get enough of us as he repeatedly switched from port to starboard for over an hour before disappearing momentarily….before LAUNCHING itself into a backward breach right beside the vessel into the glassed off water!! A definite highlight for us so far this season!
After sighting a great white from the boat a few weeks ago we thought our sharky experiences were well and truly over for the season as we had NEVER before seen one from the vessel here in Augusta. It seems as though that was just the beginning as we have made two new cartilaginous friends!!! We were lucky enough to witness two juvenile tiger sharks feasting on a dead fish that was floating at the surface as they circled and squabbled for over 5 minutes!! The pair darted off into the distance when a whale surfaced out of nowhere leaving everyone, customers AND crew, screaming from the fright (very funny AND all on video)!!
The number of competition pods has increased almost DAILY!! Both large and small male humpbacks have been VERY active throughout the bay as they’ve attempted to woo the lovely ladies, commonly resulting in an array of surface activity on our afternoon tours which we now call 4pm “Happy Hour” and BREACHES GALORE!!!!!
Lastly, a little southern right whale update for you all! We thought we’d lost our first southern right that we named “spot” after not sighting the large animal for over a week! However we now have two large individuals residing in the bay! Spot and another, both potentially pregnant females from the size and width of their bellies! This is a great sign for this early in the season and we can’t wait to see what unfolds throughout the rest of our time here in Augusta! The weather has also been SO KIND to us over the last week with extremely calm waters and low winds throughout the whole bay enabling us to head out and beyond the Island into deep BREACHING territory!!!
