Sunday August 6, and it was slated by the weather people to be a top ten weather day of the year, well they failed with that forecast! But it was one hell of a whale watching day. The conditions were cloudy, cool, ZERO Ocean swell, 1 foot wind chop, the wind was gusty out of the SW and the water was still murky from the rain yesterday.

We charged out of Breezy, got to the ocean and the boat didn’t even rock, flat seas! The bunker were there but not in numbers and not on the surface. We quickly came upon a Humpback Whale and it quickly went into lungefeeding mode. What’s weird is that I didn’t see one bunker fly out of its mouth or around the whale once? Maybe they were almost at the surface and we didn’t see them. The whale did a bunch of lunge feedings today but one was very unique. Different whales do different things when they are lungefeeding. Some get out of the water in an all out attack on bunker, others don’t waste too much energy and take it slow. This whale did a lungefeeding, then stayed on the surface, rolled over and displayed its Ventral Pleats. Then rolled over to its right side and did a blow half in and half out of the water and that was loud!

Second day in a row a Humpback came 5 feet from the boat and gave a scare to a few that were right there.

The whale we met today is a new Humpback Whale to NYC and it gets number NYC0061 in the NYC Humpback Whale Catalog held by Gotham Whale. Its nickname is New Jersey or Jersey for short. If you didn’t know, I am the curator, and quite honored to be the curator of that catalog. Its also a pleasure to work on the AP with GW. The Captains, crew and the GW team are awesome and I also meet some very interesting people that come on the WW’s, an overall great situation for me, I must say.