Photo of the Week: December 05, 2011

Hi Gang! 

So I am talking with Captain Steve on the phone a few days ago and he tells me that the first humpbacks of the winter have arrived in Maui. Instantly I am both jealous and ecstatic. Jealous because I am not in Maui right now, and ecstatic because I will be going to visit the Captain and his gang this winter while whale season is in full swing. Whale watching in Maui is about as good as life gets for me!

I suppose it is obvious that because I am not in Maui right now that this week’s POTW of a breaching humpback whale is from a previous trip. In fact I created this image during Whale Week 2011 this past February. Whale Week is a special event every February run by the Captain and some whale specialists in an effort to help whale experts gather information about the population dynamics of Hawaii’s humpbacks. All of us that are involved do our best to photograph the underside of the tails of as many whales as we can because the tail photographs enable the experts to identify individual whales. In essence, the tail photos serve as “whale fingerprints”.

Sometimes during Whale Week we don’t do as much diving as we otherwise would, but that’s the good news because less diving means that the whale watching is good.

While the main objective is to photograph the underside of the tails of the humpbacks we also get to enjoy and photograph a lot of other surface activity. This activity includes spy hopping, pec slapping, tail lobbing, breaching, and other forms of play, competition and frolicking etc. No doubt about it, humpbacks put on quite a show at the surface, and it is something that I just can’t get enough of.

As is the case for a lot of observers, for me breaching is a highlight of the surface shows. You never know when or where a humpback is going to breach, but in many instances a whale breaches several times in succession. This means that if you miss the first one you have a very good chance to catch the next one, and the one after that, and the one after that etc. Breaching is a common sight off Maui during the winter months, and like so many people I have seen humpbacks breach hundreds of times. No doubt about it, I get a huge charge out of it every time, and I think I always will.

I captured this POTW breach with a Nikon 70-to-200 mm zoom lens and a 1.7 telextender mounted on a Nikon D 300 camera. This breach was the third in a series of three breaches. I suppose I could go on and on trying to describe what it is like to see a 50-foot long humpback launch itself out of the water with water flying everywhere as the whale spins around as it crashes and splashes its way back to the surface. But my words will never do the scene justice. So, I am going to stop here and share one of my photographs from a breach that I enjoyed last year.

I hope you enjoy this week’s POTW!

See you next week,

Marty