Whale watching

To me whales have always been exotic animals, I cannot reach the and see them during my daily life. Sometimes with a good portion of luck I can see their smaller cousins the harbor porpoise (Phocoena phocoena) in Danish coastal waters, but bigger whales are very rarely visitors to Danish sea. So getting to a place like Peninsula Valdes where real big whales sometimes can be spotted from the coast or from a boat is amazing.

So we got us places on a boat that could take us out into the Golfo Nuevo, where female and cubs of the Southern Right Whale should be spending the late spring in November. Mating season ends in October, so males have migrated away again.

We had booked us onto a boat in the afternoon, but this day the whales had chosen to stay far out in the golf, requiring the boats to sail a long way, this meant that our trip was postponed by 2.5 hours and started at 18.30. I took more than an hour to reach the whales, fortunately we could spot birds, penguins and sea lions on the way out. During the tour we met 2 mothers with their cub. Not doing a spectacular show with big splashes, they just swam calmly through the water feeding on the krill.

As we were out late we were rewarded with a nice sun set in the gulf waters.

After the sunset the boat headed back to Piramides, as you can imagine it also took more than an hours. With the sun set temperatures plummeted fast so every body got had a bit of a cold evening, but happy that we succeeded to see the whales.