Monday, day eight- A whale of a tail

We spent the morning whale watching with Captain Dan. We’ve gone whale watching with him many times and always had a good time. This was another good excursion. From past experience, we knew how to snag our favorite seats above deck at the front of the boat.

All whale watches follow pretty much the same routine. Motor around looking and listening for signs of whales, and then stop and watch when you find one. Most times you’re lucky, and a few times your not. We were reasonably lucky this time. We saw several whales and spent time at each sighting to wait for them to come up again before moving on. At one point, Captain Dan cut the engines and put a hydrophone into the water, warning us that there probably wouldn’t be anything to hear. But we could hear one whale, quite a ways away. Not as spectacular as the recordings we’ve heard, but still a pretty cool real-life experience.

The other highlight of the cruise was seeing three flukes at once. We saw three whales together and they all started to dive at about the same time. Just as the first fluke slipped beneath the water the other two whales had their tails up, too. Sorry folks, no picture of that. If you’ve ever been whale watching, you know that most of your pictures turn out to be vast expanses of water with a tiny, shiny black spot somewhere if you’re lucky. I had decided not to try to catch everything with my camera, since it is mostly wasted effort. Even with a really nice camera, by the time you see the whale, and then find it in your viewfinder, the whale is frequently back under the water. My camera is a little pocket-sized cybershot. And at the time, I was peering between two people who had scurried to the front of the boat to stand in front of me with their cameras.

Typical whale shot- look carefully, there really is a whale there!

This is what another shot like that looks like after it's been cropped- a lot.

At one point, we were cruising past the opening to the harbor and noticed that there was a lot of dolphin activity so we paused there to watch the spinner dolphins for a while. They are so interesting to watch and were very close all around the boat so that we could hear them surface, breath and splash. Fun!

After the whales, we spent a little time with Novell and then headed up to Hawi (1-1½ hrs.) to look at a piece of furniture. Aargh! The shop we had browsed in on Thursday was closed. The shopkeeper next door said the owner was sick. We killed time by slowly, slowly browsing every other little shop in the tiny, tiny town of Hawi, and then headed to Waimea for dinner at Daniel Thiebaut’s. Nice food but not the greatest service. We also decided that this was the place where one of our credit cards went missing when we couldn’t locate it later in the week. Couldn’t convince the restaurant to check the places we thought they should check. Decided to let the cc company deal with it for us.