Whales

We saw four species of whales – humpback, fin, minke and southern right – and one other kind of cetacean, dolphins, one of which we think was the dusky dolphin). I can only positively identify two species in these pictures – fin because of where we saw them and what the experts thought they were, and southern right because we got a good look at them.

As some of you know, whale photography is frustrating. Whale spotting is relatively easy – you look for clouds of vapour. But the little suckers usually move so fast, you’re lucky if you can photograph the ripples where they’ve been. So we did pretty well, I think.

These were our first Antarctic whale sightings:

 

This, my dear friends, is a very important environmental substance 🙂

I said the whales were hard to photograph. Not always. This guy was happy to swim along for about fifteen minutes at the surface, utterly unperturbed by the big noisy thing to his left

If you know your fins from your minkes from your humpbacks, you might be able to diagnose which ones these are. I can’t.

Mostly we saw whales singly, rarely a couple at a time. Until our last day in Antarctica – ironically the day with the worst weather and visibility, forcing the captain to abandon plans to sail into Hope Bay, and head for Elephant Island instead. As the fog lifted temporarily, we started to see whale spouts all over the place.

This is as the weather improved, believe it or not.

And then it became like a geothermal area as a pod of around forty fin whales (identified by our on-board Antarctic experts), coming up all around the ship, very close. The captain was reported to be incredibly excited and worried about hitting them, and refused to use the stabilisers until we were well clear of the South Shetland islands, for fear of hurting the animals.

But once we left Antarctica, whales were a bit hard to find again – until we were on the way to Puerto Madryn, and again, quite suddenly, we were in a group of whales, this time, southern right whales. These were diagnosed by their bifurcated spout and, well, we could see them up by the boat 🙂

This is about the clearest photo I have of a dolphin from the trip – but I had a good look at them close to the ship and they are definitely black and white: