Whale watching in Perth today was high energy and exhilarating as this morning we came out straight into a competition pod with five males strong chasing one female humpback south as the winds made a dramatic addition to the wild chase by the boys. The five boys started pushing in towards the female with huge energy, big exhales as they reached the surface trying to get as much oxygen as they could to dive down to try and get as close to the female as they could, hopefully being chosen by her to be her escort down the coast. Normally we have this sort of energetic competition pod at the start of the season but today we were lucky enough to witness one late on the southbound migration. After a while of intense chasing they slowed down just a little bit as they started to sort out who was in line. A few change of directions by the female kept them guessing as they started to head south so we let them go and turned around to head back into the sighting grounds.
It wasn’t long before another blow was sighted, as we got closer more pods started to pop up all around. It looked to be two escort pods with a male and female then three seperate bachelor pods all getting closer and closer to the females. One of the male escorts then went into a big dominate tail lob telling the other males to keep their distance. Unfortunately one bachelor male wasn’t going to listen to that with a huge breach he then started to move closer towards this escort pod, making the original male escort very nervous so he tried again with the tail lobs to deter the bachelor males approach. Further bachelor males breached to our left which started a chain reaction of breaches and tail lobs creating a spectacular scene.
As we headed out for our second tour the exhilarating energy remained as we first sighted three mother and calf pods communicating towards each other with surface activity. One of the calves with a beautiful black belly starting the conversation off with breach after breach. Another pod close by was tail lobbing in return as the conversation flowed amongst them all with our little black bellied calf making the most noise. Settling down after wearing themselves out the calves settled in for sleep time as we noticed a pod becoming boisterous a few other meters away. Approaching we watched on as the little one had a lesson with mum as pec slapping, tail lobbing and inverted fluke slapping was practice nonstop. It was beautiful to watch as mother whale diligently taught her calf in the windy conditions as they both had much fun repeating the Language of the Whales with the young calf perfection her technique.
