Frederick Sound, Southeast Alaska
We departed the quintessential fishing village of Petersburg after a full morning of sightseeing by plane, helicopter and rubber boots (the infamous bog walk!). Sailing north towards Frederick Sound provided a little down time for some already much needed napping after just a day and a half of active exploring in Southeast Alaska. Arriving in the wide-open waters and turning west towards the even larger Chatham Strait we had a three hundred and sixty degree view of rich, productive feeding and gathering grounds for humpback whales. Now all we needed were the whales themselves. It didn’t take too long for one of our sharp-eyed guests to spot a blow ahead of the ship. This whale proved to be alone and not particularly “surface active,” although these facts did not dampen anyone’s enthusiasm for our first sighting of the trip of a baleen whale. After a time we left the lone cetacean to its own devices and we sailed on, enjoying a lecture on forest ecology in the lounge as we covered more distance westward.
The decks filled once again shortly after 5 pm when scores of humpback whales were sighted ahead of us. Based on the strength in numbers and the variety of surface activity present, several executive decisions were quickly made…cancel the evening’s recap presentation and postpone dinner by a half hour. We spent the next two plus hours enjoying a show quite unlike any other. With beautiful late afternoon sun strategically lighting the stage we floated amidst perhaps as many as fifty leviathans all quite involved in socializing with one another. There were whales in every direction one looked spouting, fluke slapping, flipper slapping, breaching and trumpeting. The three individuals pictured here lined themselves up to nicely illustrate at one time the three stages of the most common surface behavior we observed. From right to left they are: Spouting, where the whale exhales and then quickly (and invisibly) inhales. Arching, or preparing for a terminal dive, where the namesake humped-back is shown as the whale prepares to descend for a lengthy dive, and Fluking, where the whale lifts its massive tail skyward as it simultaneously descends into the deep. This is the point at which cameras click and buzz in order to catch the whale’s billboard-sized nametag—the distinctive pattern of black and white on the underside of its flukes. A little after-dinner research in the ship’s library provided us with the identity of our third whale. The scallops in the trailing edge of the flukes, the white line on the left side and the width and depth of the central notch constitute the more obvious marks that allowed many a curious guest, from as young as age six and a half on up, to match this individual with another photo in Humpback Whales of Southeastern Alaska, A Catalog of Photographs, by Janice M. Straley and Christine M. Gabriele. This reference, begun in 1979 and compiled in part by high school and college students in Sitka, Alaska, identifies our “third from the right” whale as #0052. One of approximately 1400 humpback whales known to frequent the incredible marine world of Southeast Alaska.
We departed the quintessential fishing village of Petersburg after a full morning of sightseeing by plane, helicopter and rubber boots (the infamous bog walk!). Sailing north towards Frederick Sound provided a little down time for some already much needed napping after just a day and a half of active exploring in Southeast Alaska. Arriving in the wide-open waters and turning west towards the even larger Chatham Strait we had a three hundred and sixty degree view of rich, productive feeding and gathering grounds for humpback whales. Now all we needed were the whales themselves. It didn’t take too long for one of our sharp-eyed guests to spot a blow ahead of the ship. This whale proved to be alone and not particularly “surface active,” although these facts did not dampen anyone’s enthusiasm for our first sighting of the trip of a baleen whale. After a time we left the lone cetacean to its own devices and we sailed on, enjoying a lecture on forest ecology in the lounge as we covered more distance westward.
The decks filled once again shortly after 5 pm when scores of humpback whales were sighted ahead of us. Based on the strength in numbers and the variety of surface activity present, several executive decisions were quickly made…cancel the evening’s recap presentation and postpone dinner by a half hour. We spent the next two plus hours enjoying a show quite unlike any other. With beautiful late afternoon sun strategically lighting the stage we floated amidst perhaps as many as fifty leviathans all quite involved in socializing with one another. There were whales in every direction one looked spouting, fluke slapping, flipper slapping, breaching and trumpeting. The three individuals pictured here lined themselves up to nicely illustrate at one time the three stages of the most common surface behavior we observed. From right to left they are: Spouting, where the whale exhales and then quickly (and invisibly) inhales. Arching, or preparing for a terminal dive, where the namesake humped-back is shown as the whale prepares to descend for a lengthy dive, and Fluking, where the whale lifts its massive tail skyward as it simultaneously descends into the deep. This is the point at which cameras click and buzz in order to catch the whale’s billboard-sized nametag—the distinctive pattern of black and white on the underside of its flukes. A little after-dinner research in the ship’s library provided us with the identity of our third whale. The scallops in the trailing edge of the flukes, the white line on the left side and the width and depth of the central notch constitute the more obvious marks that allowed many a curious guest, from as young as age six and a half on up, to match this individual with another photo in Humpback Whales of Southeastern Alaska, A Catalog of Photographs, by Janice M. Straley and Christine M. Gabriele. This reference, begun in 1979 and compiled in part by high school and college students in Sitka, Alaska, identifies our “third from the right” whale as #0052. One of approximately 1400 humpback whales known to frequent the incredible marine world of Southeast Alaska.
