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Overnight we steamed east to get away from yesterday’s whales and start a new patch. The acousticians deployed a couple of buoys on the way and heard whale song but only sporadically. The rest of the team were up just before dawn to an acoustician looking very tired and somewhat bored – they have become used to busy nights with lots of singing. The acoustician gave us a ‘best guess’ bearing for the location of whales and as that was all we had to go on we gave it a shot. After steaming for about 10 nm sure enough there they were, a pod of six feeding blue whales. We stayed with this group carefully moving among the dispersed pod collecting photo-identification data. All were feeding at the surface making very fast lunges and tight turns so were maneuvered very slowly in case the whales were too focused on feeding to notice our vessel. Although the day was very calm with only gentle swell we decided launching the inflatable could still cause difficulties so instead we decided to head south to deploy a sonobuoy in deep water (where there is better sound propagation) to see if we could locate distant pod. In transit we saw what we first thought was a pod of pilot whales. Given the work had been going so well we decided to take a closer look despite some risk of a few tut-tuts from the ever-focused acousticians! While closing we saw three species were in the grouping – bottle-nosed dolphins, long-finned pilot whales and a species that was not immediately recognised. After much cautious debate among the experts onboard they decide the pod of about 12 animals were … Shepherd’s beaked whales. I couldn’t be further from being an expert on these rare whales but those who are infinitely more knowledgeable, tell me there have been fewer than ten documented sightings of these whales ever (!!) – apparently most of what is known about this species has come from stranded specimens. As you can imagine the camera shutters were going off madly and between us all we hope to have enough good images to confirm the sighting. While still digesting this event we almost ignored the small pod of Cuvier’s beaked whales – also a rarely sighted species! Right – after all the excitement it was then time to focus again. We got back to our track and the acousticians returned to their station – even they had abandoned their post when they heard what had been spotted up top. We dropped another sonobuoy, got a cross bearing and once again found another pod of feeding blue whales. We returned to careful maneuvering between the whales and again collected more photos of their individual-specific markings. To complete the day we dropped another sound velocity profiler and we are now heading south to sit next to our sonobuoy in deep water to see if we can hear a new pod of whales.
An eventful day.
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.