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The forecast southerly arrived but took a while to blow away the fog. Again the acoustic team were hearing many blue whales close to our location but all were within ice floes that were too dense for our ship. We therefore decided to patrol the ice edge as close to the acoustics mark as we could hoping that one or two whales may stray out into the open water. Surprisingly this somewhat vague and optimistic strategy paid dividend and over the day we sighted three Antarctic blue whales and collected photo-identification data on two. As it turns out we had previously sighted one of these whales earlier in the voyage. Many humpback whales were also sighted as we surveyed the ice edge.
We are now conducting a mid-water trawl on echosounder marks to verify the identity of the detections.
Tomorrow is our last full day of research before we must leave for New Zealand. We are hoping the visibility will continue to improve and more blue whales will move out the thicker ice.
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.