Maui, Day 6


On our last day we do some whale watching

Lauren and I had originally booked our flights so that we would fly back at midnight on Monday evening and get in on Tuesday afternoon. We soon found out that almost everyone else had decided to take the earlier 6PM flight and get into Austin on Tuesday morning. So we decided to get on standby and fly with everyone else. That still left us time to get in some whale watching so we packed our bags and drove to Lahaina Harbor for some serious Shamu action!

Here we all are on top of the Pacific Whale Foundation's glorious double decker observation boat. We have Jed, VeeDub, Andra, Patrick, Thad, MacKenzie and Andy with us:


And here is one of my famous one handed shots of Lauren and I. I should get an award for these things - it's like having your own private camera man with you at all times I tell you!



As we were pulling out of the harbor, Andy pointed out two things to me:

1. The blue skies and lush mountains here in Lahaina:


2. The grey blanket covering Crapalua to our north:


Sad but true.


Soon, our boat was upon a "pod" of whales and we were all heading for the railings to snap some pictures. As we frantically searched around for signs of whale action, our on-board "naturalist" (this is VERY different from a "naturist" which google will explain to you if you are curious) gave us many interesting whale facts that I will share with you below. Unfortunately, my zoom is pretty wimpy and we really never got all that close to the whales so the pictures are kind of lame. It was, however, much more impressive in person. Thad and I tried to "speak whale" and call them over to the boat but it really didn't work and mostly just annoyed the other passengers.

If you look closely, you can see the back and then the tail fins of a whale in these two pictures:


Fun whale facts:

1. These are Sperm whales which migrate from their feeding grounds in Alaska to Hawaii every summer to mate and birth their calves.
2. Sperm whales have no teeth. They are baleen whales which have long strips of finger-nail like material that hangs from their upper jaw and allows them to capture and strain out their food from the water.
3. Scientists have never captured a sperm whale mating or birthing on film so they really don't know much about these behaviors.
4. Sperm whales are estimated to live about 40-50 years.
5. You can tell how old a dead sperm whale is by (I am *not* making this up) pulling out the earwax plug from it's ears and counting the rings.

In this next shot you can sort of make out the whole tail fin of another whale:


All in all this was worth it. We weren't exactly feeding the whales or shaking their flippers but we got to see a fair number of them from a bit further away and it was very interesting,

We headed back to shore and then headed to the airport to catch our flight. Everything worked out perfectly with our timing and we were easily allowed to fly standby on the earlier flight. It was pretty tiring, though, and we didn't get much sleep. We landed in Dallas at 5AM on Tuesday and both Lauren and Wendy decided they needed to sleep on the airport floor to get a few more minutes of sleep:



We were back in Austin by 8AM and actually able to get in a full day's work!

Thank you Ben and Mary Ellen for giving us a great excuse to take a wonderful vacation in Maui!

Posted: Mon - March 15, 2004 at 02:11 PM      

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