Whale watching and other adventures

Greetings from Hervey Bay (pron. Harvey) Australia,

My morning dosage of Dramamine is still wearing off.... so hopefully all of this makes sense!

Steve and I just got done with a FANTASTIC day of whale watching. We hopped on a tour this morning that took us out to an area of the bay where humpback whales like to hang out and rest during their annual migration between the Antarctic and the warmer waters of the northeastern coast of Australia (around Cairns.) The tour guarantees you'll see a whale or you get another trip out for free, so we figured this would be a good day.

The ride out was pretty choppy (I was fine w/ the aid of my seasickness pills, Steve the lucky guy was fine with no assistance) but it was still a beautiful day. After about an hour's ride out, we stopped close to a smaller pod- just a mother and calf- and watched them swim around, use their blowholes to breathe (sidenote- as they exhale, water leaves the blowhole at a rate of about 450km), we even saw the calf breach a couple of times. This is where he jumps basically out of the water and does a sort of flip- very Discovery Channel. Once those two mellowed out we drove around looking at a few different pods of mothers/calves- all was really tame for a while, just whales swimming around and being pretty quiet.

The most exciting part of the tour was at the very end, when a mother and her calf and her male "escort" decided they were curious and came right up to our boat to check us out. Apparently if you cheer and wave the whales get curious and want to take a closer look, so there were two boats of us (about 80 people on each) just cheering away while these whales swam between the two boats. The male was HUGE- we never saw the whole thing, but it looked to be about the size of our boat. The mother was actually encouraging her calf to come closer to the boat to check us out, nudging it along. They came within 20 feet of us, so you could really see the bumps / details on the head and underside. The calf also treated us with some tail flapping (where it goes upside down and flaps its tail against hte surface of the water- the baby is in practice mode to learn all of the things that will be handy once it leaves its mom.)

It was an amazing day- we were so lucky to have that experience to take home with us. Since leaving Cairns a week+ ago, we have had some great times seeing the local fauna....which I will write about another day- my stomach's growling, it's dinner-time, and Steve and I have decided to give ourselves a break from cooking so we're going to eat out tonight.

Thanks for all the well-wishes we've gotten over the blog and e-mail, it's great to hear from folks and make the trip that much more meaningful for us!

Cheers,
Anna