Back to Hermanus

My parents and I went to Hermanus today to see the whales.

It was my fourth trip out there in as many months, but this was easily the best whale-watching yet. The whales were so close to the shore this time that even on my digital camera with a puny 4X zoom, I managed to get some pretty good pictures of whales jumping out of the water. We were so close that, at the end of their descent back into the ocean, we could hear the crack as they landed on their backs.

There were probably nine or ten whales close enough to shore for us to see them, and for an hour or more, it seemed like at least one of them was breaching every minute or so.

The last time Katie and I went, we felt priviledged to see one whale breach seven or eight times. This time, I must have seen forty breaches.

Then there was one mother whale with her young calf who were idling even closer to shore. They weren't doing any acrobatics, but they were so close that I could easily have thrown a baseball to where they were floating in the waves.

Not that I'd hit a whale with a baseball. That'd be mean.

A few more pictures from today are here. These two pictures on this page are cropped and zoomed a bit, but the originals show you how close to the shore these big fellas get... and there are people in the pictures so you can see just how gigantic they are.

My parents were shooting film and had a fantastic zoom lens, so I'll put those up in a few weeks when they've been developed.