So in May, right before Memorial Day, I was out on a sailing trip with Apparent Winds Research, an education charter sailboat.
We were out on the Hudson Canyon for a few days and we were looking for sperm whales for a filming project. We did not find any sperm whales, but so we had a spout in the distance and it was our first spout. And, in the past, when I’ve been on the canyon, we’ve been able to find sperm whales. And that’s kind of the species I was expecting to see off the shelf break where we were. And so I thought that’s what the spout was.
And so we get a better look. There’s no dorsal fin. I was like, okay, well, that’s a sperm whale. And then. And then it wasn’t. I pull up my binoculars and we have a right whale, like, speeding, like he is hauling across the horizon, offshore of us. And so I’m like, okay, well, we’re not, that’s crazy. He was too far to get a photo, but, like, that was cool. No one’s gonna believe us. And so we keep going.
We, we move inshore, right up to the mouth of the canyon. I say inshore. We’re still like a hundred miles southeast of New York City. • And then this fog starts to set in. But just like, you know, half a mile away at the edge of this fog, we see two whales come up and blow. And it’s two right whales. And then, engines off and then like all around us in this fog, like, you know, just as far as we can see, it’s just right whales come up.
And so we ended up having six or seven right whales, around us right here, right at the edge of the Hudson Canyon.
And so this was a few days before Memorial Day. And if, you know, the Hudson Canyon Memorial Day weekend is insane. It’s a parking lot of boats, so we were like, we need to make sure that people know about this. We weren’t going to be on shore for another few days. So we used the sat. We used Starlink or whatever to get a report to Danielle, and she sent it to all the people. And Noah sent out an aerial flight a few days later. And over the course of the next week, they found 45 right whales on the Hudson Canyon.
They do they not expect to see right whales on the canyon for any real duration over the course of the summer. For most of the summer, they had 80, 82 different right whales right on the mid Atlantic canyon.
There were a few sporadic sightings before us from research vessels, but as far as I know, we were the first substantial, like, group observation of right whales here in the mid Atlantic. That led to that bigger feeding group, discovery here, which is super crazy. And it’s a big data set for that. That just gives them more questions to try to answer this summer to see if it’ll happen again.
-Chris
This post was adapted from a voice recording in episode 80 of the Whale Tales Podcast, listen here.
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