A fantastic way to officially start our 2010 season

Hello everyone, we officially begab our 2010 whale watching season today with 2 great trips on the Bay. On both trips we spent time with minke whales (3 on our 10:00 am departure and 4 on our 2:00 pm), seals, harbour porpoise, bald eagles and we saw some diving gannets on our afternoon trip as well.

My boyfriend Rob was a passenger on the boat today and he took over my camera so I wanted to share a bunch of his pictures from today with you all,

First, here are 4 different minke whales that we saw today, you can see that their dorsal fins are unique and in the case of the last one, has no dorsal. This whale was injured at some point, there is some very light scarring but is just fine now without a dorsal fin.....we are affectionately referring this this minke as Slice.

Here I am showing a sample of minke whale baleen to some passengers...well, Rob had me pose and take a photo after I explained the baleen.


We also had a great sighting of a small shark, there are lots of sharks in the Bay but we don't often see them at the surface.


We spotted this mature bald eagle on Spruce Island, there was another mature and a young eagle there as well.


We stopped off Fish Island to have a look at an aquaculture site. Here is a worker feeding the young salmon.


And finally I wanted to share a series of pictures with you, these are harbour seals, we stopped at Casco Bay Island on the afternoon ebbing tide to visit with both harbour and grey seals. Seals will haul out on reefs at low tide to rest and here you can see a harbour seal going back into the water....and as we often see they may not be very graceful.


Thanks for checking in today, stay in touch for more sightings,

Cheers,
Danielle