Whale breach on video. 16Oct12

TR by sunshiner

Wind: Gentle SW 5 knots, swinging to 5 knots SSE
Swell: small SE
Current: at Jew Shoal, none
Launch point: Middle Groyne
Participants: sunshiner

Today's theme (cropped frame from video). See video link later.

When good offshore weather comes along I like to get out in the yak if at all possible. Today was such a day. I was aware that the fishing prospects were not good, but you never know around here, so at 0500 today when I awoke and checked Seabreeze I committed.

Launchtime. Wouldn't you have gone too, if you had the opportunity?

There was a guy baitfishing from the end of the groyne when I launched. He hadn't done any good but I did encourage him to get a yak, I think.

Cutting a long story short, I paddled out to Jew Shoal confirming on the way that my refit of the sounder in the new boat was working as hoped. That's another item ticked off the list. Conditions were great but in two hours of working SPs over much of the territory I hadn't had a touch. Still dead!

No sign of surface action, either. Even the local cormorant was eyeing me off hungrily. No whales, either. Then snort! Behind me, as usual. Maybe there IS a whale around. Louder snort! Lines and drogue in, I spin the yak horizontally just in time to see black portions of a large-ish whale less than 100m behind me, travelling toward the east.

Whale #1

OK, that's my fun for the day, so I may as well head back toward Middle Groyne, trolling as I go, of course. Noting that there'd been a tiny bit of pelagic action recently around the river mouth I set course for that area only to come across the white rigid inflatable used by the whale researchers. On board was the male skipper with several researchers who would have made very acceptable fish holders. They enviously ogled my yak, cameras in hand. I presume the yak was the object of their attention, although there's an outside chance they were ogling me, I suppose. Being used to such behaviour I thought nothing of it, but there could have been a touch of sexism there, from the fish holders that is.

Anyway, close to where they were parked, two km from Middle Groyne, a large white triangular object was protruding from the surface. It looked exactly like the buoyant bow of a sunken boat but the chief researcher and boat skipper told me it was a female humpback and her calf, resting, as they do. I promised to not get too close and paddled gently toward it as it was on my planned track.

Resting, belly up, only the end of the tail protruding.

A couple of other kayakers showed up. They were not fishos and I didn't recognize any of them. Despite the law, these guys started to get a bit too close to the whales, certainly within 50m of them.

Both mother and calf, plus kayaker.

By now I'd got my big camera out. I almost always shoot video with the small camera but in this case I was shooting stills but the subject was a little too far away. Then the calf surfaced and started to swim around mum so I switched to movie on the big camera and just started to follow the activity.

The calf nudged mum quite solidly and there was a splash, which I was quite pleased to see was right in my viewfinder, then mum got seriously annoyed and took off with a swirl in the 13m deep water. The camera was still going when she breached once, then again, before returning to more normal behaviour.

See the action in Laguna Bay today. And be wary of getting too close to whales!

As both creatures were now swirling around willy nilly I and the other kayakers decided to make ourselves scarce, so that was the show over for the day.

I paddled back to the groyne and picked up a beautiful little wave from just outside the wall, surfing it all the way in to the beach, hitting the sand hard enough with my skeg to bring me to a jolting stop. Bewdy! Now all I had to hope for was that the video I'd just shot on the camera I don't usually use for video was in focus. It was!

No fish, but what a compensatory experience. What a place to live!