Whale Watching

What a surprise, yes, I went whale watching😂I had thought about not spending money for that, but I just wanted to do it. The tour was with a high speed boat, equipped with quite comfortable airplane-seats. We were only allowed to be outside when the vessel was not or only slowly moving. The first fascinating animals we saw, were in fact no whales, but albatrosses. Quite majestic birds with their wingspan of up to three meters. The area around Kaikoura is known for the sperm whales ("Pottwale"), that are permanently there, but only males. For the females that are about 30% smaller than the males, the water temperature is too low. The whale watch vessels try to locate the whales by listening to their whale songs. Sperm whales dive down for feeding for about 45 minutes and then come up to the water surface for some minutes. They eat big squid ("Tintenfisch") and fish, even sharks (also the great white shark), but they would never attack other mammals, a big difference to orcas who do so. A sperm whale could easily attack an orca, however, the orca is safe because it is a mammal. We saw the first sperm whale shortly before he dove down again, not enough time for photos... About twenty minutes later we were more lucky. The skipper had located the second whale early enough, that we could see him coming up and a few minutes later diving down. Honestly, it is impressive to see such a huge whale (the fourth largest of all whales the largest tooth-whale), but you can only estimate his seize and he is not doing much more than swimming just below the water surface - no comparison to the humpback whale ("Buckelwal") we saw jumping for almost one hour in Iceland. Well, the sperm whales in Iceland were as lazy as here😁 Closer to the shore we saw many dusky dolphins. What fascinating "little" guys, seeming to have so much fun jumping out the water again and again! It is more fun to watch the dolphins than the sperm whales. After such a great day, I had to treat myself with mussels for dinner😊

P. S.: I might add further pictures from my camera to this footprint the next days.Read more