Well Its Saturday, time for another full day of activities! I'm going to post them separately though this time as they were quite different.
First thing Saturday I got up and headed straight down to Darling Harbour. My plan was to head out to sea and see some Humpback Whales! I managed to get on a trip last minute (whew!). Instead of going out a a large catamaran type boat, I went on a small boat that's usually used as a rescue vessel. It fits about 20 people on board, I have a picture of it in front of the IMAX. Its a little scary heading out into the open ocean in a boat only 30' long, especially since the last time I went out on the ocean (Kaikoura, New Zealand), the ocean swells were 30+ feet!
The weather was forecast to be pretty good for our trip, just ~5 foot swells, nothing too big. On the way out we went past Middle Head (where I had seen those old military forts built into the rocks), and we went out between the North and South Heads. Once we were on the open sea we were able to look back on Australia. It was very neat to see it from out at sea. I could imagine I was Captain Cook sailing in on the HMS Endeavor. There was a huge amount of smoke around though, North of Sydney there was a controlled bush fire in progress. They burn sections of bushland to try to keep the undergrowth in check. You can see the trail of smoke in the photo below.
As we continued on our way out to see (we went about 7 miles out to sea), we passed a pod of Dolphins. They come as quite a surprise, sorry no photos! They were quite pretty to see in the wild! Once we arrived at where we thought the whales would be, we just sat and waited. A couple of Albatross (The world's largest sea birds) flew by. I managed to get a nice shot of one as it flew right near the ocean surface.
We wait and waited. We were out at sea nearly 45 minutes without getting to see any whales ;( I was bummed because I knew we had to turn around and head back in any minute. "No whales today" I thought... Just as the skipper turned the engines on to head back to port, we spotted the mist from a whale surfacing just ahead of us! Wow, a whale! I was so glad I was on a small boat because we were just that much closer!
We came across one whale, it was a calve, maybe 6 months old. It was out on the ocean by itself. It was about the size of the boat, about 25 foot. Huge animal! Most whales just swim by and you hope to catch them surface, stay up for a bit, and swim away. Then you hope to see another. If you are extremely lucky, you will see once breach (fly out of the water and slap on the surface). We weren't that lucky but this whale did take quite a liking to us! It stayed and 'played' with us for about 20 minutes. swimming up and away and back again. It even came up and swam on its side and waved with its flipper, not very common at all! It was a very cool experience! I compiled a video of footage I took! Check it out.
1 comment:
wow that is cool
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