Whales ahoy

Well as the name of the post implies I did go whale watching this morning, the weather was my friend today.

After a quiet night at the Top Spot Backpackers last night, another nice hostel full of very friendly and chatty people (plus the obligatory guy who plays guitar and knows the entire Jack Johnson back catalogue), as well as having a lovely cat that is 18 years old and is enjoying his twilight years by being fed bbq and generally spoilt by the backpacker community. Lucky old thing.

In the morning I dragged myself out of bed at 8am, which was hard as it was pretty cool out, I am now used to warmer temperatures, had a lovely hot shower, dressed and staggered out to my car to drive the full 5 minutes round the corner to the Whale Watch office (I am turning in to an American! sorry to my Californian friends, but you know what I mean!). Much to my relief our boat was confirmed to be going out and other than light swells the sea was pretty calm. In fact, while the temperature has dropped the sky is a beautiful clear blue and the sun is very bright. Hopefully it will warm up here during the day.

We headed out on a coach to the boat and I was sat next to a nice Irish girl called Katherine, who realised that she had left her memory card for her camera at the chemist where they were putting the pictures on to disc for her. As a result she is with me now as we are waiting for my photos to be put on disc, one each so she has shots of the whales in action.

On average Whale Watch say they see 1-2 sperm whales on an outing. We were spoilt and saw 3 of them. They are amazing, although it is hard to get a feel for how big they are because most of them is underwater. They had come up to re-oxygenate before another dive (they generally stay under water feeding for 45 mins, although apparently the record is over 2 hours!). You can see the water spouting when they are up for air. I took lots of pictures that all look like a log in the water, but that is life! I do have a couple of great tail shots though from when 2 of them were diving! It was excellent, worth the morning for that alone.

We were also joined out there by some lovely large albatross (sorry but they just look like giant sea gulls to me!) and a huge pod of hundreds of dusky dolphins. I have got some great pictures of them jumping and swimming around the boat. They seemed to be having so much fun, I can't wait to swim with them tomorrow morning (weather permitting, fingers firmly crossed, although I do realise that even in a wet suit, it is going to be arctic in there.. brrrrr). After that we sailed past a load of fur seals lounging on the rocks. By this point my camera battery had decided that it had enough and had run out. Fortunately I have lots of pictures of fur seals from Abel Tasman so I wasn't too worried, plus hopefully we will go past them on the dolphin swim trip as they were near where the pod of dolphins were frollicking.

So that brings me up to date again. I will keep you posted on the dolphin swim and am currently making my mind up about whether to go for a sunset horseriding trek around Kaikora tomorrow night. Although, knowing me, I will talk myself in to it using the "once in a lifetime trip" card. It works everytime. So for my friends in London, all I can say is I may be a tad on the poor side when I see you all again in July. I will not object should anyone want to buy me a drink : )