Two whales of a time

As another cool excursion on Mo’orea we decided to go out on a boat with an American biologist (he’s been on German TV) to try to spot whales. This biologist told us that it is peak whale season currently and that oftentimes they like to even come into the lagoon to hang out. He was saying that you can see dolphins something like 95% of the time you go out looking and whales almost 85% of the time, that’s how many there are. Mo’orea is also a recently discovered breeding ground for humpbacks (he discovered this fact) and previously they only thought that humpbacks came to hangout here, not to breed.

So with that set up, the sun shining, the boat pulled away from the dock and we were so excited. We looked around the lagoon for a few minutes to no avail, before they decided to take us outside the reef to see if there was anyone out there. That’s when we noticed the dark clouds rolling in. The second we exited the reef and felt the waves, we realized this wasn’t going to be a nice little boat ride. For the next two hours, we boated around the roaring waves in the rain, squinting to see evidence of whales. Apparently we saw four, evidenced by blows, but Jess missed them all. Through the off and on rain though we did see a couple of sea turtles, spinner dolphins and a type of turn the guides were very excited about. Jess was a little too sea sick to think of the really hard hitting questions for our guide, but we did learn that southern hemisphere humpbacks look different from northern hemisphere ones.

Then as we reached the southern tip of the island, just as we were getting ready to go back we saw something! Two humpback whales! Literally right in front of us! Then they swam right by us, passing maybe 10-15 feet away. No cool leaps out of the water like Ben was hoping for, but we did get to see one of their tails as they swam away. After we watched them leave we drove back through the lagoon and to our nice warm hotel.