The Grand Asia & Australia Voyage - Holland America Amsterdam, September 19-November 23, 2008
Text by Snookums, Pictures by Filbert
Part Thirty-eight
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November 5 (Wednesday, Day 50, Sydney, Australia) - Continued
We hustled back to the ship for a 15-minute lunch before packing up our cold weather gear and walking to the other side of the Sydney Cove for Ocean Dreaming to pick us up for our whale watching tour. The 115-foot, three-deck catamaran picked us up and away we went. The seas were a little choppy but the wind was fierce and we were both glad to have taken seasick pills. One guy didn't and his full bag of vomit was overflowing and then being blown by the wind! Filbert was using his camera so he only had one hand to hang on with while it was all Snookums could do to keep steady using two hands. It was very rocky and very windy and everyone really hung on. No one was in any danger of falling overboard, although we were surprised that no one ever fell down on the deck. Anyway, we got out to the ocean and since the boat had some kind of tracking equipment, it knew where to go.
Sure enough, we found ourselves watching a pod of four humpback whales. We learned that whales surface and then go back down for 5-10 minutes before re-surfacing so we just stayed in that spot for about 45 minutes and watched the whales. These whales seemed to stay submerged for about 8 minutes or so. They weren't too active when they surfaced and just used their blowholes and did some fluke up dives to go back down. We saw a lot of their backs, but that was about it. The captain wanted to find a pod of whales that had been more active and breaching earlier in the day so we went to another spot.
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Whale 1 |
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