On this first trip we didn’t have a lot of visibility, although the sea conditions were good. After searching for a while, we finally found a few spouts southwest of the shipping lane, about 14 miles offshore.
The whale was traveling, which made it difficult to locate in the dense fog. There were lots of large ships passing through the lane and the pilot boat was in the distance. The whale was in 124 feet of water.
There wasn’t any bait on the fish finder when we were near the whale, but in other spots we had seen birds carrying anchovies. On our way back in, we saw three more humpback spouts in the shipping lane with lots of birds around them. We marked the spot to return to it on the next trip.
On our next trip we headed west through the shipping lane in search of the biological hotspot we had found earlier. We found it slightly southwest of its previous location, but still close to the shipping lane.
In this area we found four humpbacks feeding in only 48 feet of water. We saw tons of bait on the fish finder and lots of birds hovering in the area as well. The whales performed lunge feeds several times.
Big wind waves made viewing somewhat tricky, but we were still able to observe whales coming within 100 yards of the boat. We stayed with these whales for about 30 minutes.
We also spotted a relatively small Mola mola (Ocean Sunfish) in the area.
-Allison
This post was adapted from a blog, read the original here
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