Day 12 - Whale of a Day

We booked a 9 am whale watch hoping to see more whales.  The last whale watch we went on was at 11:45 am.  It was madness at the harbor.  A cruise ship was visiting Lahaina and they took over most of the pier.  Fortunately, I am a member of the Pacific Whale Foundation and we get priority boarding.  We were able to get a seat in the very front of the boat.  We just got out of the harbor and I jumped up to take the front corner of the bow.  I was not going to miss any whales today.  Soon we say a baby whale jumping around. 

He was quite active and I have a dozen pictures of him, jumping out of the water.  We soon saw an adult whale playing on the surface, close to the cruise ship, slapping his fins on the water. 

We are still in the first 15 minutes of the whale watch when an adult whale decides to jump out of the water.

Isn't he cute?  Looks like he is waving to us.  We continue to move into the channel and we see whales everywhere, and then they magically disappear.  Apparently, they can be underwater for over an hour.  We saw a few whales in the distance and I have a lot of fluke pictures.

We then started to head toward Molokai.  The captain had received information from a research vessel of a competitive pod of whales and a pod of spinner dolphins.  When we got there it was amazing,

I was just clicking away, getting more splashes than the actual dolphins and then something amazing happened.  The dolphins left the research vessel and moved toward our ship.  We had dolphins leaping ahead of us, behind us, next to us and in front of us.  They were so close that I was unable to focus on them with my zoom lens. 

The water was a clear blue but it didn't translate to my picture settings.  I really need to read that book on digital photography. 

I was finally able to take a picture of the dolphins as the swam next to our boat.

I have to admit that will all the excitement with the dolphin pod, I actually forgot about the whales.   Check out how close the research vessel is to the whales.

We had to return to the harbor :( but I took a picture of the raft that I am going on tomorrow for an up close and personal whale watch.  Check it out!

Almost to the harbor when we see an adult whale coming straight at us.

And with a splash of his tail he disappeared.  Probably swam under our boat.  What a fabulous whale watch.  The whales were more active in the morning.  My raft trip is scheduled for 6:45 am tomorrow so I am going to see the sunrise over the West Maui mountains and hopefully get very close to a whale.

We ended a fabulous morning by having yet another shaved ice at Local Boys.  We had our usual lava flow flavor but for ice cream we went with the guava sherbert.  It was ono!  We even moved up from the pretty baby size to the momma size. 

We went back to our condo to rest after all the excitement of the morning.  I also developed a sore throat and my ears seem to be blocked.  I was able to avoid all the germs in Wisconsin only to have picked up something in Maui.  Hopefully I will feel better by tomorrow.  Aloha from Maui.