Daily Trip 11 December 2017

Guide Summary and Photographs

After a no sea day, we were eager to get out to see if our whales were still where we left them. To our absolute delight, we’ve still got quite a few animals around and are really hopeful that they’re still going to stick around for some time! We also got to see a 2 other members of our Marine Big 5 on our tour, and had a lovely day out despite the south wind making it a little chilly out there!

We had a little wind in the morning so it was decided that we’d launch a little later today, when the wind had subsided a bit. We left the harbour at around 12 O’clock and followed our most common route, hugging the coast all the way along to the shark cage diving vessels. We took a stop at our sister company, Marine Dynamics, in the hopes of seeing a shark but, at the time of our stop, we didn’t manage to catch sight of one of these misunderstood creatures, so we decided to move on over towards Pearly Beach in search of our whales.

The shallows of Pearly Beach are immensely popular amongst Right Whales, with us spending most of our season watching these gentle giants in this region. Over the last week or so, we’ve been moving past the town and towards the beach to find our first whales but, today, we were lucky to find our first pair pretty quickly. We’ve been seeing this pair over the last few days, with the mom being easy to recognise due to her half brindle appearance. Brindle is a colouration seen in Southern right Whales were the animals are born white or partially so. 95% of brindle animals are males but, one can get the occasional brindle female too. Something that we also see is females like this mother, who are not a full on brindle but rather a “half” brindle. As the animals age, the white fades into a dull grey, which makes for a very pretty sight.

Mom and baby were a relaxed bunch and even came in for a closer look, with us getting a great view of the tail, which mom kept just below the surface of the water. After watching these two, we moved on to a further 2 pairs of whales, who came together for a bit towards the end of our sighting. Although slowly travelling, these whales were a bit playful with us seeing the occasional tip of the tail and even a spy hop from one of the young ones.

After this awesome sighting we made our way to our island systems. Dyer Island and Geyser Rock are located only about 20 minutes away from the harbour and are home to some pretty impressive sights which includes 60 000 Cape Fur Seals and 60% of the entire Cape Cormorant population. We cruised between the few islands for a while, checking out our bustling seal colony who were chatty as always. The island was filled to the brink today, so much so that hospital rock seemed to harbouring more residents than usual due to their being so little space.

We head out of shark alley and back towards the harbour following our stop at Hospital Rock, spotting a lone African Penguin in the water along the way.

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