Daily Trip 23 July 2018

Guide Summary and Photographs

Today, we were treated to yet another marvelous tour with a very active pod of Humpback Whales. The weather is still holding up beautifully, so we launched with perfect conditions and decided to make our way towards Danger Point. This area is where we often find Southern Right Whales along the coast or a Humpback or two in slightly deeper water. What we found here surpassed our wildest dreams when we came across 4 Humpback Whales travelling only meters off the cliffs.

In this region, it’s not all too often that we find our Humpback Whales in shallow water, with most of our sightings happening beyond the 50m water mark. Today’s spectacular sight took place in only 16m of water and was definitely one to remember. After getting some lovely photographs with these beauties and the lighthouse, they started to become very surface active, chasing each other and throwing parts of their tails out the water.

It soon became clear that this was a mating pod, and that the males had only one thing on their mind. This meant that the whales paid very little attention to us but gave us some out of this world views, approaching the boat and getting up close and personal as they moved speed to catch up with what we believe to be the female. The sighting began with 4 whales, but soon, another suiter came charging in and we got to see them all move in unison with 4-5 spouts erupting from the ocean at the same time and giving us an experience we’re unlikely to forget.

Eventually, we decided to leave these animals to carry on doing their thing, so we moved on towards Dyer Island spotting a few African Penguins along the way. This included a baby penguin, which we commonly refer to as a baby blue. We got to watch him do a bit of preening before we had shark ally call our name, after which we headed through the washing machine.

Once again, the visibility of the bay has been absolutely breath taking, allowing us to see the inner works of the alley and watch our Cape Fur Seals play below the surface. We also checked out those lazing in the sun before heading towards our next order of business.

This was the shallows where we had hoped to spot a Great White Shark. We got lucky when a dorsal fin popped up at one of the vessels, for this meant that we had seen both the largest predatory shark in the world but also the largest of all the bony fish, when we had spotted an Ocean Sunfsh.

Our very last sighting of the day was definitely the right kind of animal, when we spotted 2 Southern Right Whales are on the way back to the harbour. These whales are among the biggest in the world, fighting of the 3^rd largest title with the Bowhead and Sperm Whale. Where these animals lack in length, they definitely make up for it with weight, being a very chunky, blubbery species. Once we had watched these guys surface a time or two, we slowly cruised back to Kleinbaai.