Wednesday, March 12, 2025

Humpbacks all day!




 This morning we visited Cabo Palma National Marine Park. This park is the result of work by the local community and conservation groups to recover the coral reefs and marine species after years of over fishing. By 1995 the area had been declared “dead”- no coral, no fish. After ten years of no fishing and no commercial boat traffic, the coral began to recover. It is now a vibrant (and well protected) marine area, one of the most northerly coral reefs in western North America and with enough fish that apex predators like sharks have returned. 


We went snorkeling this morning in a stiff breeze, which made both the swimming and the navigation by panga a little challenging. After snorkeling, our panga headed to the edge of a cliff to visit a California sea lion colony. The original plan had been for us to re-enter the water to swim with them, but the 9-foot swells made that an unsafe proposition. Suddenly a humpback breached about 40 feet from the panga, and our focus changed! We watched a female humpback and a two month old ( estimate) calf breach, slap their pectoral fins and “tail slap” for at least twenty minutes near the rocky shoreline. To be more accurate, the mother did all these things and the baby tried to imitate her. It was mesmerizing— so much so that we forgot to be cold! 


We spent the afternoon cruising very slowly to the south, to Punta Gordo and then past Cabo San Lucas to Finisterre, the southern tip of Baja. This region is a rich wintering ground for humpbacks, and we lost count of how many we saw. We saw some additional female-calf pairs. They were often accompanied by one or more males hoping the mother might be ready to mate.  


There was a tremendous amount of pectoral slapping, tail slapping and breaching. The theory is that multiple males were competing for attention. Some tail slapping involves a partial dive to lift the tail vertically out of the water (imagine children practicing handstands) while others resemble leg lifts with the whale on its back.  The afternoon flew by. At sunset we looked west past Finisterre to successfully witness the green flash at sunset. A great day. 


Pictured: baby breaching, leg-lift tail slap, blenny (a mudskipper type fish)

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