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Another great day at sea. For those us who got a good night sleep we were greeted in the morning by six or seven blue whales around the ship. The acousticians had done us proud again by monitoring the position of these whales all night. It just didn’t seem right to steam away from these whales but we were keen to do another profiler drop in deep water.
After dropping and retrieving the profiler we then dropped another sonobuoy. This told us the only whales in range were the ones we just left but it was useful to be able to acoustically triangulate the position of this pod with the additional buoy.
With the weather easing and the acousticians looking like they needed a break we decided to launch the zodiac. We got close to a few of the morning’s whales but unfortunately they were not quite cooperative enough for us to deploy a satellite tag. These blue whales seemed a lot trickier than the ones we have tagged previously off Perth - the number of blows per surfacing were few, maybe only 2 or 3, so it was hard to get the boat close enough before they were gone again. Never mind – we did get lots of good photographs for individual identification and of course it was fantastic to see the whales up close.
With the sonobuoys picking up another pod of blue whales to our south we gave up our tagging attempt and retrieved the small boat. Strong winds were forecast so we only had about an hour to find the whales before we’d have to head back to port. Sure enough right at the triangulated position we saw a blow – and then several other blows. After congratulating ourselves and high-fives all round some killjoy had to point out that in fact it was a pod of sperm whales! Hmmm… a pod of 10 or 12 big male sperm whales was not quite what we were looking for but still great to see. The hypothesis now is that sperm whales can mimic blue whales when they want to play tricks on scientists!
We are now heading back to Portland to avoid a hard blow so Tuesday is likely to be a full day at the wharf.
REGARDS: Mike
Map
A map showing Australia and Antarctica. The map shows the journey of one voyage that has occured in the season, with each route highlighted in a distinct colour.