Wednesday, July 01, 2009

Whale watch update

I've been getting quite a few emails from folks asking how the whale watch season is going so far. Here's a guest post from one of our whale watch tour companies with an update:

Hi Bay of Fundy Blog followers! I'm Danielle and I work with Quoddy Link Marine, a whale watching company out of St. Andrews, NB. Our tours take passengers out on the NW corner of the Bay of Fundy around Campobello, Deer Island, Grand Manan and the Wolves. Here's how our season is going so far... It's been a foggy start, and the fog remains but we have managed to get quite a few afternoon trips out amongst Head Harbour Passage where there are some holes in the fog (as the warm air blows over Campobello it creates some clear spots in the Passage). We are seeing minke whales on a consistent basis as well as lots of seals (both harbour and grey) and harbour porpoise.

For all you birders out there, the common birds sightings are good (bald eagles, herring and greater black back gulls, black guillemots, black-legged kittiwakes and eider ducks) but with the fog we also get some unique offshore visitors to the inshore area such as puffins, murres and shearwaters. We had a group of northern gannets the other day that we actively feeding, so diving from over 50 feet in the air, off East Quoddy Head Light. All of the bird activity is a great sign of herring (food for both the whales and birds) in the area.

Yesterday we did make a short trip down off Bliss Island to see if we could hear any fin whales, in the fog, when there is little wind, we often listen for whales, being able to hear them blow, or exhale, over a mile away. We didn't hear anything yesterday but you never know unless you "look".


Thanks for taking the time to read my guest post, if you want daily updates on our settings check out
our blog and you can follow us on Twitter.

1 comment:

Deborah Carr said...

Hi Terry - We had an extraordinary whale sighting of 12-15 pilot whales by a group of kayakers at the Hopewell Rocks on the weekend. This is highly unusual this far up the bay.

See my post on this occurrence with a link to the YouTube video shot by one of the kayakers.