Whale Watching (and being Watched)

We went whale watching this afternoon on the Alii Nui. There were whales breaching and tail slapping everywhere until we cleared the harbor. Then, like someone threw a switch, there was calm everywhere. For 30 minutes, the boat captain searched in vain for a spout and asked us all to look for any sign of a whale. Finally, I spotted one at one o'clock and another, closer at 11 o'clock, surfaced with a calf. The captain cut out the engine and let us drift into them.


The calf was a newborn -- still light grey as they are at birth. The mother, unescorted, first tried to shepherd her newborn away from the catamaran. Just as everyone was getting bored with the occasional spout in the distance, the baby had a tantrum. Tail slapping, spouting, even trying to breach! Eventually, the mother relented. She was large and this clearly wasn't her first. She let the baby circle closer and closer to the boat, keeping her body between us at every step. Eventually, baby and mother were less than 10 feet from the boat! On several occasions, the mom actually went under the catamaran and we could see her body inches from both surface and hull through the netting under our feet. They were clearly looking at us as we were looking at them. If the deck was lower, we could have touched them and risked the $300 fine.

Larger than our boat, the mother whale started to scare one of the human ladies with children on board. The captain helped her to the center of the catamaran, where she could not see the large animals cavorting under her feet, and calmed her down. The rest of us were overjoyed at our luck and ignored the fact the mother could have sunk or flipped the Alii Nui at any time.

After an hour of exploring the boat and the people on it from every angle, the baby finally became bored with us, as all children will, and wandered away with mother in tow. The captain remarked that he had only gotten that close three times in his 21 years providing whale watching tours. With that, he turned back for port.


Once back on dry land, we did some shopping for necessities: toilet paper, snickers bars, donuts, muffins, and books. Karen got her first experience shopping at Hilo Hatties. She "won" a couple of "free" pearls at the oyster station and they were pretty good sized, but not worth the $250 the clerks were insisting on charging to have the pearls set as a part of the promotion. Connie skipped dinner, but Karen, Ed and I all had Mahi Mahi at the Wailea Golf Club.

Tomorrow: The Summits of Haleakela!