We went whale watching today, one of our Christmas gifts to each other. It was an INCREDIBLE day!!!!

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We were told we’d go out 3-5 miles to see the whales, but we were barely on the outer edge of the bay when we saw two whales:

Oscar and Belen from Onca Exploraciones RoCK!!! If you haven’t gone out with them yet, you definitely need to. I have gone whale watching about eight times in my life, I’ve seen much bigger whales (blue whales vs. humpbacks, for example), and Danny and I even spent ten days at a marine biology camp, but this was really special. The boat, Oscar, and Belen are pictured below (Belen is in the middle in the photo on the right; Oscar’s photo is blurry because he’s always moving and speaks with passion—surely no photographer error, lol):

Oscar and Belen are both marine biologists. Oscar is working on his PhD research, a project to photo-ID the whales that frequent the waters of Mazatlán. Amazingly, to date this has not been done. Over the past three years, Oscar has photo-identified 174 different whales. Like human fingerprints, whales have unique visual identifiers, often the underside of their tail fins, sometimes also the scars they bear, and this is what they track. I post a couple of photos of flukes below, so you can see the uniqueness, as well as a close-up of some scarring, to give you an idea of how they ID the whales. Oscar, if I’m wrong about this, let me know and I’ll correct this wording. Below you can see:

1. The first tail has white spots all along the edge.
2. The second has barnacles or something stuck to the edge of the tail.
3. The third has specks of white on the outside, becoming more fully white in the center underside of the tail.
4. The fourth has white on either side, but a black triangle in the center underside of its tail.
5. The last photo below shows some typical scarring, which can also help identify the whales.

So, anyway, their goal is to take photos of the whales and give each of them a name or identification, so that they can then be tracked and their patterns learned. The good thing for us is we get to ride along. It is a small boat—maximum six passengers, so we were able to get very close to the whales. We were able to get so close that we felt we could almost reach out and touch the gorgeous creatures. Danny and our neighbor Brian wanted to jump out of the boat and swim with the cetaceans.

Oscar gave us a pre-trip briefing on whales, particularly humpbacks. We learned a lot both before departure and during the cruise. For example, humpbacks are balleen whales. There are three main northern Pacific groups: those that migrate from the Arctic to Japan, those that go from Alaska to Hawaii, and the whales we see here, that migrate along the coast of North America. The humpbacks have striations on their stomachs, the wrinkles we have all seen in pictures. We learned these are like stretch marks (my analogy :)), so that the whales’ stomachs can stretch out when they suck in a bunch of plankton and water, and so that the stomachs resize themselves to normal when the whales push out all that extra water. We learned that when the humpbacks are up north, in the summer, they eat and eat and eat, storing up blubber. Then, when they come south, they don’t eat for four months or more! Down south here is their breeding ground, where they have their babies. The adult males are busy showing off for the adult females, since there seem to be MANY more males than females, and great demand to win the honor of partnering with a lady whale. The men sing to attract the women; the longer the song, the stronger his lungs. The men also fight to attract the women, or at least to establish their ranking in the whale hierarchy and be the first in line to collect their winnings… We saw whales thrashing around a lot. Typical me, I delighted in the fact that they were playing. No, Oscar told me, they are actually fighting with each other–hitting one another with their fins, and we even saw some jumping on top of one another as if they were wrestling. A slide show is below:

Whales Fighting

Today was the first day of Christmas break, so of course Danny was NOT excited when he had to wake up for a 7:30 am rendezvous in the marina:

But, after a few whales, here’s what the teenager had to say about the day:

The thing that made this trip so different for me was the SOUND. It is quiet out there, with the motor off and only a few people on board the boat. If you’ve been out in a sailboat, you know the feeling. But, when you are in the midst of so many whales, what you hear is silence plus, suddenly, the whales breeching, or blowing; you can even hear them breathing…. it is sooooo beautiful! The first photo below you can see a whale’s blowhole, on the whale on the left. The second photo below shows a humpback’s head.

 

National Geographic Traveler highlighted whale watching in Mazatlán as one of the great adventures on our planet. 🙂

 

Whales Diving

Finally, let me conclude this blog post with one last slideshow, of a humpback taking a dive. Merry Christmas and happy new year!

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