whale research

[platy]

I absolutely loved living on a boat out at sea. What made it so easy was that everyone was great to live with, there were no clashes of personality and even though there were 11 of us on a small boat you could still get space and time to yourself. It was a good break from reality.

For a short stint I think we got some good data. Over 3 weeks we got about 35 samples to analyse. Each sample is halved and half goes to the project and the other half goes to the Australian Antarctic Division to do their analysis. Recordings were more difficult because of the conditions. So different ways to approach recordings were being hashed out for next year. But their calls are so loud we could hear them through the hydrophone when they were about 1km away.
Considering I'd only seen a whale once in my life before this, to me I did see a lot of whales! Within hours of leaving port we found a mother and calf. And we'd often see big, continuous breaches from far off in the distance.

They're certainly not tame. Mothers and calves are often very slow moving, because you know the baby has to feed and continually go to the surface and what not. So sometimes, particularly if the calf was younger, they were a bit more curious and perhaps a bit more relaxed. We'd get calves spy hopping and doing little breaches around us, which was totally adorable.
Some of the adults didn't want anything to do with us, and while we're trying to follow them they're constantly changing direction so we'd just have to give up and let them go.
As opposed to a competitive pod where they're so focused on each other and trying to get the female they'd take no notice of us. At one point we were actually IN a pod of 5 whales and they're swimming all around us and going under the boat, huge thrill to be so close to them.

Definitely rugged. No one lives on any of the islands.






Scawfell Island again. Yes the water is actually that colour. Amazing