A friend and I spent 7 days in Alaska this Month. I signed us up for 4 whale tours with Harv&Marv tour company. We knew that seeing 3-4 whales would be considered a good trip. We had 4 great trips! We saw 30+ whales! We got to see bubble feeding at least 5 times!
I got some great photos that included up to 12 whales! In one of the bubble feeding photos I can see just how thick and long the baleen is on a whale and!
That whale is blowing air / water out of its spout. We saw numerous whale tails, of course. But then we also saw 3 breaches! One happened on the other side of the boat from me and I caught a fraction of it.
In the one day the weather wasn’t great and the whaling had been less than the prior 2 days, we came an upon a small group of whales. One kept just hanging out in one spot. I kept watching her dorsal fin expecting her to swim away or dive under. She was a pretty good distance away. Suddenly she went under, I was panning my camera around waiting to hear a hiss of a spout in distance.
I had my lens fully at 600mm. Suddenly the captain yelled that something was about to happen port side. I had my camera ready! Then about 50-75 feet from the boat that whale breached and just after a second whale breached! Lol I got a very extreme close up picture of the whale’s belly and the droplets of the hugs splashes! But I got to see 2 humpback whales breach within seconds! (Luckily another passenger was filming on wide angle with camera and got it!). But that wasn’t all!
There is a baby humpback in Juneau this summer named Goose who is about 8 months old. We got to see her several times. However, the last time we saw her, we got observe her playing for about 6 minutes. She was doing belly rolls on the surface. She was slapping the water with her tail. She was diving and showing off her tail. She was rolling on her belly and sticking her pectoral fins out of the water! It was so fun to watch her.
Overall it was a great 4 trips. (Juneau was great for wildlife! I also saw porcupines, sea lions, harbor seals, huge salmon, eagles, and 7 bears which included 3 babies!)
-Helen
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