best whale day ever

April 2
In the morning the weather was too windy and snowing too hard so all morning excursions were cancelled and the Captain moved the ship to find a better spot in a bay. At 3pm we got the announcement to get ready to go in the zodiacs. The water was very calm but had a lot of small pieces of ice. One of the people in my zodia had a waterproof camera duct taped to a ski pole so he could take underwater photographs. In the video link I will send later you can see someone in another zodiac with the same setup for underwater pictures. In this video I am in the zodiac from which the photos and video are being filmed, so what you see is what I saw and it was amazing.

Our zodiac guide was so excited by everything the whales did and told us it was possibly a once in a lifetime experience to have 2 huge humpbacks playing around, under, and so close to our boat for over 30 minutes. At one point a whale rolled over on its back and laid with his fins stretched out, kind of like a "scratch my tummy" pose, Our guide said he could die now, since he had the ultimate whale experience!

I am infamous for saying over and over," I was so close to whales I got whale blow on me THREE TIMES!" but it's true- of course I needed a good shampoo after that, and it didn't smell that good, but it was totally worth it.

 It is hard to put into words the thrill of being that close to the whales. I get the question frequently about if we were afraid or in danger and the answer is that we never were afraid and never felt in danger. The whales would pop their heads up and look to see where we were, then dive under our boat. They were playing and having fun - if you can imagine something 50 feet long and 50,000 pounds "playing"...

i will send the video link and more whale pictures later!