"Thar be Whales! Day 2" post in Carib Goodies blog

As promised yesterday in my blog, I went whale watching and, indeed, the whales did show!

It is a big ocean out there and a whale sighting is never guaranteed. We were fortunate this morning to sight two, possibly three, whales.

At 9:30 a.m. the crew of the catamaran Jolly Mon and their guests, members of the Environmental Association of St. Thomas (EAST) and marine biology students of the University of the Virgin Islands spotted whale spout 3 miles off the port bow the earliest in the day ever in decades of whale watching.

Brief factorial
Humpback Whales travel to Virgin Islands waters to breed during the winter months. From February through April East hosts whale watching expeditions to watch for these giants of the sea with the purpose of recording their activities and to lookout for Japanese and Icelandic whaling ships that sometimes try to poach our waters.

Humpbacks do not feed during their stay in the tropics, but rather give birth to their young and train them in our warmer waters. As summer approaches, Humpbacks head back north to their rich feeding grounds off the continental shelf of New England and Canada.

The first whale was spotted to the North West (Atlantic Ocean) just off of the passing cruise ship Noordam and was in full breach. (Leaping out of the water, a precursor to diving deep.) A full half hour passed before a whale spout was sighted again, three miles off. (Pictured below.)

The whales did not full breach again during our watch, but did appear frequently for air. During these surfacings, a calf was spotted with mother. A very exciting treat as the evidence of young is rare, but a great sign that the species is recovering from earlier whaling slaughters.

Humpbacks in our waters rarely travel in groups of more than two or three. Pilot whales will travel in pods counted at over 50 members and sometimes sailors will mistakenly identify them as humpbacks. Dolphins also perpetuate our waters and a group of five showed off briefly for us before a brief rain squall caused them to move on.

We came no closer than 3/4 of a mile to the whales (a bit over a kilometer) 1) so as not to disturb the calf and 2) no permits are currently being issued for close observation of whales even to researchers. That's a fine, jail time and confiscation of the boat.

The Virgin Islands Daily News will be publishing one of the images in Monday's edition.

None of the images have been retouched other than to resize for upload. I will not ask forgiveness for crooked horizons, the goal was to photograph quickly surfacing and submerging whales. Shooting straight horizons on an ocean tossed boat was at the far bottom of my list.

Enjoy the photos. I will be going back out on the next expedition in two weeks.

A sense of scale. My son, Johnathon, 5'10", stands behind a vertebrae of a humpback whale. Likely from a juvenile, this bone is part of a whale's spinal column. On top of the bone are a few pieces of baleen, the material baleen whales have instead of teeth that allow them to filter small smishand plankton that they eat as food.

To the left bottom of this image is the skull of a bottle nosed dolphin. (And no, the romance novel does not belong to either my son or me!

The cruise ship Noordam passes us a mile to port. Hold on when that wake hits! When the ship was several miles out, the tourists on deck got a treat as a full grown Humpback whale leapt into the air off the ship's port. This was our first whale sign of the day. We cut motors and hoisted sales to close on the sighting location.

The intrepid crew and guests of the "Jolly Mon" set out from Red Hook, St. THomas to seek whales.

Second whale sign! Out in the distance a huge spout of air as a humpback surfaces a half hour after the first sighting. We dropped sail and set to drifting.

A whale! A whale! A treasured sight. A mother humpback whale surfaces briefly with her calf. Such sightings, while probably not the most picturesque in the world, have immense scientific and environmental value in the study of recovering whale populations. The mothers hump is behind the smaller hump of her calf.

Another look as the calf starts to disappear beneath the waves.

You never know what you will see, if anything, when you go whale watching. A small pod of dolphins, 5 in all, came racing towards our boat at we watched the whales. Unfortunately, the excitable newbies on board all started rushing about the boat to see the dolphins racing across our bow and even under us. One stood on his tail a few brief moments to look us over. With rookies rushing back and forth, the captain struggled to keep the boat stabilized and I could only get one clean shot free of peoples heads before the dolphins raced off ahead of an approaching squall. Ah, well, next time I will get the performance shots! :)

After a couple hours of whale watching, we headed back towards St. Thomas and Christmas cove. This is a lovely shallow and calm bay on a key sitting just off of St. Thomas' west end. The bay is very shallow and sports as its highlight many living banks of coral reefs. I will post a bunch of Christmas Cove pictures tomorrow, but for now a couple teases.

A five foot barracuda stands off and watches me for a few seconds before deciding I was boring company.

A smattering of fish surrond one of the coral reef banks at Christmas Cove.