Kelp Gull Project: A day at sea

I have spent my first full day at sea, and I survived! We launched the boat at about 09h10 and beached at 16h30 or so.. What an eventful day!

Gwen is here with her team looking for Bryde’s whales and as part of my training for when they move down the coast and leave me to do some solo work I spent the day with them out on their boat. Wow. It was a beautiful day with blue skies and sunshine, a high of 29°C and flat sea, perfect for my first full day out at sea! Once we had launched we headed towards Robberg, and then around Robberg and towards Knysna. We were on the lookout for ‘blows’. When a whale comes to surface, roughly every 10 minutes I now know, it blows out before in and there is a big plume of water droplets that on a good day will hang in the air as a haze and this is a big arrow announcing whale here! And so we stalked the waters looking for blows, as well as fins, and high bird activity which may also indicate whale presence. It was over an hour of searching before we spotted our first blow. And then the chase was on! Literally. You hold on and race towards the spot you the blow was seen, and you wait. These Bryde’s whales conventionally surface every 10 minutes, and will come up twice in a row, occasionally thrice. So if you are lucky you can get close enough by the second blow to get some good photos and hopefully a blubber sample. If not, you wait for the next blow, some 10 minutes later and race over to where it is. At times we were closer to where the whale surfaced, other times not so close and we had to go zooming over the water to catch up with it. All in all I think we saw 3 different whales, and got blubber samples of 2 of them. Whales were not the only animals to be seen, we also saw seals, dolphins, my first penguin at sea (!) and a variety of birds that made me wish my ID was better! I was seriously washed out by the time I arrived home, what a day, and all but collapsed into bed that night amidst moving, rocking floors. Unfavourable weather has kept the boat grounded but hopefully I can go out with Gwen again before she moves on with her team, and I hang out with the commercial whale watching guys.