Well, yesterday proved all of that wrong.

It was just the craziest comp pod we’ve ever seen. As if all the whales in it were training for the whale olympics. Why was it so incredible?

For starters, we had breaching in the comp pod. You sometimes see a breach when a whale is entering or exiting a comp pod, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a whale repetitively breach in a comp pod. And I’ve never even heard of multiple animals repetitively breaching in a comp pod. Yet, that’s what we had yesterday. Two, possibly three, different whales breaching.

We had multiple whales pec slapping. AT THE SAME TIME! Synchronized pec slapping. I’ve never seen this in or out of a comp pod. Absolutely incredible. Part of the reason you don’t see a lot of pec slapping in comp pods is that casually lying on your side slapping the water is not usually a great fighting technique as all the whales are going to swim right by you. As an aside, the photo below is a hard one to capture and get in focus. You have to aim in between the whales, but not in such a way as to focus on the mountains in the background. So all you can do is aim at the white water between the whales.

We also had multiple whales doing chin slaps. Although, these may have been the same whales that were breaching. Again, the odd thing about the chin slaps, big head lunges, and breaches is that they take the whale out of the water which is a disadvantage if you’re fighting for position. So it’s very odd. But I guess if all the whales are doing it, then they’re all at a disadvantage.

Of course, they were doing normal comp pod behaviors as well, like fighting. In the photo below you can see a couple whales collide or ram into each other. So I guess it was a combination of Olympics and Ultimate Fighting.

But I guess that’s what makes whale watching so amazing. You never know what you’re going to see and there’s always new stuff to learn. This was definitely an epic trip and a lot of fun to be part of. I’ll leave you with this last breach shot. I really like the shots of the whale coming out of the water. If you get the shot just right you can see the blow and the spray. It looks like the whale is exploding out of the water (which, of course, is what it’s doing… if you’re getting 50 tons of animal launched into the air there’s an explosion somewhere!).

A Whalers Cove Resort pool technician on Saturday saw the whale give birth while an adult whale paced back and forth protecting the newborn. The mother whale gently pushed the newborn up as if to show the baby to the world.

Whalers Cove general manager Marianne Martin told The Garden Island newspaper the whale was so large that onlookers wondered how she could turn around inside the small cove.

The whales stayed inside the cove and surrounding area for a couple hours.

About 12,000 humpback whales migrate to Hawaii waters to breed and calve every winter after spending the summer feeding in northern waters.

However, if you are like me and get excited when you see a Humpback whale 10 feet away from the boat, you might let your camera slip out of your hand. At which point you will watch your Canon T2i and Ikelite housing start slowly sinking. It’s like watching a big bag of money go down to Davey Jones locker. Not good. For a split second I considered the fact that we were in a whale sanctuary and I might be fined if I dove in after the camera and underwater housing. After the .25 of a second was up, I dove in and grabbed the camera. Luckily, I don’t think anyone other than Mr. Humpback Whale (and 18 other passengers) saw anything and their were no repercussions. I immediately got back on the boat anyways, so it’s not like I was hanging out having a photo session with the whale.

The moral of the story: Sometimes a $10 lanyard can save you a lot of camera equipment!  (Feel free to post your own stupid photographer tricks in the comment section)

It was quite impressive. Humpback Whale School was definitely in session and Mom was putting on quite a display for the baby… breaching, pec slapping, tail throwing, tail slapping… all repetitively until the baby caught on. I’ve never seen such an obvious and extended example of Mom teaching a calf.

Speaking of mom and calves…

I was at the Whale Tales conference on Saturday and Dr. Meagan Jones had some interesting facts from her research that I don’t think had been presented before.

When you see a competition pod, males apparently aren’t just aggressive towards each other. They’ll frequently put their heads above the tail of the female to prevent her from diving down. This can result in the female acting aggressively towards the males by tail throwing or other behavior typically associated with males in a comp pod.

Usually this is seen when younger males are chasing a mom and calf. As to why this is the case, I don’t think she had the answers for that. But I’ve always been told when you see a comp pod that the female is just lazily letting the boys fight around her. That may not always be the case, especially if the males are aggressive and she doesn’t want the attention.

That’s a pretty good whale photo!

But why?

There’s lots of things to consider… lighting, background, the angle of the whale as it’s breaching, how much water is flying off the whale (yes, when you have dozens of breach shots, the angle of the whale and the water droplets are a big deal  )  However the most important thing is sharpness. If the image isn’t in focus all the other stuff goes out the window. Below is some detail from the above shot (which is very small and compressed on the blog, the original is 10 times the size of what you see above).

Sharpness is almost being able to see inside the barnacle on the pec fine. Sharpness is having the water frozen in time so it almost looks like icicles.

When you zoom in on the back of your camera and you see detail like that, you know you’ve got a great shot!

One of my goals this season is to capture video footage of the Humpback whales underwater. To give myself, and all of you, some idea of what it’s like to whale watch in their environment, instead of waiting for them to come to our environment. My first attempt at this (seriously) yielded some great footage.

Humpback Mom and Baby

You can see the baby swimming around Mom, just like a kid would be running all over the place, and Mom is just hanging out. When the calves are newborn the mother will put the calf on the top of her head. Calves can’t really swim when they’re born so this allows Mom to raise the calf to the surface letting it breathe. It also lets her easily keep an eye on the newborn.

You would imagine that since this is where the calf spends most of it’s first week of life, that it becomes something of a safe spot for the baby whale as it ventures further away. You can sort of see this in the video. The calf swims around for awhile but then comes back to hovering right above Mom’s head, before swimming off again. Not being a researcher I’m speculating a bit based on the behavior here, but it would seem to make sense.

Anyways, enjoy the footage of Mom and child spending some quality time together!

Celebrating the launch of ExploringMaui.com

Our goal with ExploringMaui.com is to offer up resources to help folks that are going whale watching get the most out of their experience. We also want to educate people about the different experiences available. What you’re going to see and do in Alaska is definitely different than what you’ll want to do in Mexico or Maui, which is different again from seeing the whales in California.

One part of that experience is photographing them or taking video. While we’d love to sell you one of our archival prints of these beautiful cetaceans, we also want to help you capture your own memories. So there’s going to be a lot of content that tells you how to do that. Some of it is paid, but there’ll be a lot of free stuff, too.

But our real goal is to help you get closer to the whales and experience how amazing they are. Being a few feet away from a 50 ton, 50 foot animal in the wild is absolutely unbelievable. We hope you’ll make use of this site to experience that for yourself!

Check out this video to get a taste of it!