Whales July 23-30, 2009

(On July 28, 2009 Randy summed up our experience of that evening when he said, "It's Spiritual, Dude". It wasn't just the net bubbling of individual whales or the fluking or the loud sounds they were making for hours upon end of maybe eighty or so whales. It was impossible to count them all though we tried to make estimations. It was "spiritual, dude". The krill showed up on the depth chart that evening up to 300 feet deep, or thirty stories from the surface, and these whales were continuously lunging to gorge on them. Were their loud sounds -- sounds of delight or were they sending messages to others? We don't know but they were loud and continuous...My reaction on this video and others to what we experienced was probably more revealing than what I could capture even on film. These humpbacks were everywhere - as far as we could see and surrounding our boat. Veteran research whale watchers aboard our boat had never observed anything of this magnitude previously....and we were the only boat in sight. I woke up early the next morning at about 4:30am [8:30am Florida time], and the sounds of these creatures continued. Their sounds were so loud that I thought they were still surrounding the boat, but they had moved off into the distance. They were breaching, fluking, lunging while continuing to eat krill.)