Saturday, July 21, 2007

Still foggy but had a great day on the water


Hello everyone, it's Danielle with Quoddy Link Marine back from a foggy day on the water but a good day nonetheless. We won't always go in the fog, there are many other factors to consider such as wind, what the tide is doing, and feeding patterns of the whales. We decided to give it a try today because of where the whales have been feeding as well as our Scout Boat was out and found some "holes" in the fog. Both our morning and our afternoon trip took us off Head Harbour Light, at the northern tip of Campobello Island where we spent some time with finback whales (3 individual whales on our 10:00 am departure and 5 finbacks on our 2:00 trip). Below is a photo from our 2:00 pm departure of one of the large finback whales.
The birds seen below are greater shearwaters, one of the many seabirds we may encounter on our excursions. Shearwaters are typically an offshore seabird but with the foggy weather we often get a chance to see these species much closer to home.
Below is a photo I took of some seals on our afternoon trip. The large, dark coloured seals are grey seals where as the smaller, light ones are harbour seals. The easiest way to tell the difference between the two is to look at the shape of their heads, harbour seals have heads the shape of a dog while grey seals have heads the shape of a horse. The grey seals seen here are males. The reason I can tell is due to the colouration of their coats, male grey seals have a dark coat with small, light spots where as females have the exact opposite, a light coat with large dark spots. It's much more difficult to distinguish between male and female harbour seals as the coats are the same for both sexes.

That's all for today, thanks for checking in and I'm on the water tomorrow so I will keep you posted.

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