Hello everyone, Danielle here to share with you our offshore adventure from Sunday, September 13th! Our annual offshore trip is something we, and our regular passengers always look forward to every year. This year we lucked out with the weather but we were not sure what we were going to find as the whales have been difficult even off Grand Manan this season. We left the dock at 7:30am with 34 excited passengers and we made our way to our first stop on the Wolves Bank about 17 miles from St. Andrews where we found a large finback whale. We didn’t stay for too long as we wanted to continue offshore past Grand Manan. We also had our Scout Boat out (THANK YOU to Sean, a Quoddy Link family member and ex captain, Jolinne, a Quoddy naturalist and Sarah, the captain of the Elsie Menota of Whales n Sails from Grand Manan) to help with the search. Our next stop was close to Whitehead Island past Grand Manan with another large finback whale and a few minkes.
Finback whale off Whitehead
We also had some incredible pelagic bird sightings in this area with phalaropes and petrels, shearwaters and gannets, puffins as far as the eye could see and a very special sighting of a south polar skua!!
South polar skua
Our Scout Boat continued on and they met up with the Jupiter, a boat with the NEAq right whale research team and they agreed to keep in touch and we would let them know if we saw anything and they would also let us know what they saw….and are we happy they did. The Jupiter called the Quoddy Link and let us know that they had 4 humpback whales another 8 miles from us!! So, off we went, another 8 miles into the open Bay of Fundy, When we got there we spent time with 2 of the 4 humpbacks (they were in pairs and the second pair was further out) who we IDed as Lace (a female who is very large and may possibly be pregnant) and Partition. We got some amazing looks at the pair before we had to start the 2.5 hour trip back to St. Andrews.
Lace
Partition
Lace
Partition
humpback raising her tail
blow of a humpback
Lace fluking
beautiful humpback fluke
look at the scars on the peduncle of Partition
The scarring is on both sides of Partitions peduncle
Lace
In total we were over 43 miles from St. Andrews and out for over 6.5 hours but the trip was amazing! Thank You to everyone who joined us this year and we hope to see many of you again next season.
Thank You again to the crew of the Scout Boat and the Jupiter for all of your help, it wouldn’t have been possible without you!
Cheers,
Danielle
