A mouthful worth waiting for

We watched the water in silence. The only sound was the water rhythmically lapping the side of the Zodiac. The sun was hot even out at sea and it cast diamonds of light on any imperfection on the oily surface.

It’s always like this Whale watching. 50% of your time is travelling and 45% waiting. The remaining 5% is the best; when cetaceans show themselves. We were waiting to see a Humpback in the St Lawrence, Quebec. It had dived somewhere in this area 10 minutes earlier.

Sometimes they can come up from the deep far from where they went down. But sometimes, just sometimes …. they can come up real close.

Cetate Away

When I started the business ‘Wildlife Tours and Education’ in the latter part of 2008 I wanted to increase my knowledge and identification of cetaceans. To do this I spent some time with the Seawatch Foundation. The Seawatch Foundation is a charitable organisation whose main aim is to involve the public in collecting sightings data of cetaceans around the UK. Since then I have kept in touch one way or another and this month I took up an appointment with them as Regional Coordinator. If you see a cetacean off the Norfolk Coast please report it to me. Anything from a Porpoise to a Blue Whale; just drop me a mail or give me a call.

A couple of Humpback Whales have been offshore from Aberdeen for around a week now. I’m told they are showing down to around 100m. Perhaps the mild conditions are having something to do with them wintering so far north. By now they would usually be down in the tropics.

I wish we could get one wintering off Norfolk. Alas the sea depth here would not normally support the larger whales – although stranger things have been known.

In the meantime we will have to settle with the photograph below of a Humpback we watched off Boston Massachusetts a couple of years ago.

The white markings on the undertail flukes of a Humpback are unique to that individual. This ‘fingerprint’ enables whales to be identified wherever they wander in the world.