Whale Watching

The weather in Boston has been really weird.  It literally rained for like 5 days straight.  The nice part is that the temperature and humidity have been relatively favorable.  Anyhow, the sky finally cleared this past Saturday and Lisa had the brilliant idea of going whale watching!

So...we did some quick research and apparently, there is a huge underwater plateau located just 20 miles from the Boston Harbor.  The area is called Stellwagen Bank and is actually a marine sanctuary.  During the summers, huge pods of whales come up to Stellwagen and basically eat up a storm.  

Despite the high probability of spotting whales, we didn't want to get our hopes up too high. Last time we tried to spot whales, we ended up empty-handed after driving 100 km in South Africa through a ridiculous rainstorm.  But that's another story for another time.

After showing our student IDs and getting a modest $3 discount (which was counteracted by a $2 fuel surcharge), we boarded a big catamaran and headed out to Stellwagen.  Overall, the damage was somewhere in the neighborhood of $73.  The cool part, however, is that you get a free pass if you don't see any whales!  It took about an hour and we had some nice views of the Boston Harbor Islands and some pretty neat lighthouses.  Once we arrived at Stellwagen, the whales came out in full force!!

The first thing you should know is that you usually spot whales by looking for spurts of water (for lack of a better phrase).  Basically, you look for a geyser coming out of the water.  Once we spotted a couple of geysers, the catamaran would swing over so we could get a closer look.  We saw 2 humpbacks, then 5, then a mother and a calve, then another 2, and then we lost count :-0.

One of the funniest things was that when we saw the first humpback, everyone on the boat got super excited.  In the crowd, however, a little girl murmured, "Daddy, does this mean we don't get a REFUND?"  She was totally serious and actually asked her Dad this same question

twice.  She was more excited about the possible refund than she was about actually seeing whales.  Hilarious to say the least.

Another neat thing about the experience was that our "naturalist guide" could identify nearly all the whales by name, merely from a 2 second glimpse at the patterns on their tails (their tails pop up when they go for a big dive).  

Probably the coolest thing was a little calve (calve not calf is the correct terminology) that decided to do some little tricks in the water.  Apparently this calve is especially active and playful; the list of playfulness included:

1) fin flapping

2) breaching (when the whale completely jumps out of the water)

3) sideways swimming 

4) belly-up action

5) traversing across the bow of the catamaran

The best shot we got.  FYI - if you don't have a SLR camera, its next to impossible to get a shot of the whales out of the water (you literally have less than 1 second to capture the shot)

Boston's beautiful skyline at dusk on a clear and calm evening

It was so cool we didn't want to leave!  Check out our Picasa pics for some cool shots (taken using a 300m zoom on a Canon Rebel SLR).