Humpback Whales off Maui

Two visits to Maui and one to Oahu within eight months is a lot for even me, a person enamored with the Aloha State. But I had never been to Maui during whale season, when thousands of humpback whales migrate to the surrounding waters for a winter of calving and mating. While I was disappointed to discover that I had missed the peak of the season by a week, I was nonetheless thrilled to not only see dozens of the giant creatures but to even hear them.

Like when I visited the Big Island three years ago around the same time of year, the whales were easily visible from the shore. The clouds of mist from their blows were usually the first sign they were present, often followed by their back and knobby dorsal fin cresting out of the water. If the whales dived, their tail fins sometimes emerged high out of the water. One evening at sunset on Charley Young Beach in Kihei, I watched a pair of whales far in the distance toward the community of Maalaea have a sort of smack-off as they splashed their tails and dorsal fins on the sea's surface.

But it was the breaches that took my breath away. Propelling themselves almost completely out of the water, the whales created a gigantic spray as they crashed back into the sea. These spectacles were quite far from shore and appeared to happen so randomly that it was only the splashes of water not the leaps that caught anyone's attention. I ultimately decided to take a whale watching tour with Pacific Whale Foundation to have any chance of catching a good view and a photograph of these awesome events.

On the Odyssey out of Maalaea's harbor, the excursion's guide Conner told us to look out for the three B's of whales: big, blows, and breaches. Of course the gargantuan size of the creatures, often more than fifty feet in length, makes it hard to miss one when it's aside your boat. And their clouds of wet exhales are unmistakable markers that whales are in the area.

Breaches during mating season seem to be the domain of males competing for the attention of possible female partners. The females we initially saw were close to the port, in Maalaea Bay, with their recently born calves, in the safest, most shallow waters. These mothers seemed more preoccupied with child-rearing than mating, frequently swimming under their babies to guide them to the water's surface. Some whales floated on their sides as they waved or slapped a pectoral fin in the air.

The captain of the Odyssey worked his way down the coast of South Maui, passing Kihei and Wailea in a direction toward Makena. More pairs of mothers and calves were in the area, along with other whales showing their tails with their distinctively marked pairs of flukes that identify specific individuals.

The crew of the tour boat took advantage of a lull in sightings to turn off the engine and drop a hydrophone in the sea. We were soon listening from a speaker to the whale songs being broadcast throughout the Hawaiian Islands. The deep moans and screechy calls seemed more mournful than songlike. But they confirmed I was indeed hearing whales the day before while I snorkeled off the beach at nearby Makena Landing.

As we steered westward, in the direction of the neighboring island of Lanai, we finally witnessed our first breaches of the morning in a spectacular fashion. However it wasn't a lone whale leaping, rather it was a rare display of three individuals rocketing out of the water simultaneously. Alas I only captured the line of three explosive splashes in a blurry photograph.

Our craft raced across the choppy morning sea towards these behemoths as we saw several more breaches that were only duets and solos. In an explanation of why peak whale season had passed, some males might have been dropping out of the competition, relocating far eastward, to the coast of Mexico, where they'd attempt to mate again within a different pool of females. "Sounds like a man," was the wry comment from one female passenger on the tour.

By April all the humpback whales will have returned to the cold waters off Alaska where they will spend the summer feeding on plankton, krill, and small fish like sardines. And then in October, some of the first long-distance migrants will begin returning to the tropical waters off Maui and its sister islands. It is a safe place for mothers to birth and nurse their young because orcas, the whale's main predator, are rare in Hawaii. Of course along the way, the cetaceans will have to survive even bigger threats from manmade causes like ship strikes and entanglement in fishing nets.