Whale of a Time

Today’s whale watching trip goes into my top five of all time. I estimate that I’ve whale watched approximately 25 times. Once or twice each year for the from 2006 - 2017, then, due to a terrible weather day where I was incredibly unwell, no whale watching for five years, three times last year and once today.

There was a pod of five whales. One female being fought over by four males. It was FULL ON! The males were jumping and rolling onto each other and they were all swimming super fast under and around the boats. The males were opening their mouths and filling them with water and air to make themselves look bigger and stronger.

A couple of the males were bleeding from where they knocked their barnacles off. They were roaring from their blow holes.

All the while, the female was rolling onto her back and slowly flapping her fins onto the water.

This lasted for about an hour and then we had to start heading back to the marina.

On the return trip, we found two more whales. A male and female. The male looked all cut up on his head like he’d been fighting and all his barnacles had been knocked off. He placed himself half under our boat and wouldn’t move. The female just floated beside the boat, every so often bobbing her head up to say hello.

Boats are not allowed to turn their engines on when whales mug them like that, so we were stuck there for a good 40 minutes and had to call on another whale watching boat to come get the whales attention.

We didn’t get back to the marina until 1.05pm and the boat was supposed to leave for the afternoon whale watch at 1pm. The crew had to clean the boat before the new customers came on board.

I haven’t even looked at the photos yet but here are a couple of short videos from the day …

After spending three hours holding up my 4kg camera and lens, my back was burning and I was exhausted!

It was 1.30pm by the time we left the marina and since we hadn’t eaten all day, we stopped at Su Jus for some energy providing juice. It was the longest drive home and it was 2.30pm when we walked in the door.

I lay down with Harley on the couch until moving to the lounge room for an hour. I took Harley outside for a short play and then I collapsed on my bed where I fell into a deep sleep for two hours.

I’m still tired so it’s back to sleep for me now. Too much fresh air for one day haha.

Nite all.