March 30 – April 6, 2024 

Week 11 of our 33rd Season

This year Aquatic Adventures embarks on its 33rd season of providing our guests the unique opportunity to encounter the North Atlantic humpback whales on their breeding and calving grounds, the Silver Bank. As the season unfolds, we’ll highlight some of the various encounters and experiences of our guests each week. We hope you enjoy following along!

The first day at the beginning of this week, the Silver Bank was a quiet oasis. This time of year we expect the activity around the mooring to be slightly less bountiful than peak season but there are still plenty of whales around. However, the first day seemed as if the whales had just vanished from the area. The Aquatic Adventures crew knows, of course, that this isn’t the case and kept a positive outlook for the remainder of the week. Nature is nature and can’t be controlled, and sometimes there are days when the humpback whales are traveling around the Silver Bank, but not in the area of the mooring. The following day, just as predicted, as if out of nowhere the whales were back and by the dozens! Blow after blow around the mooring and all over the four square mile area we monitor. Again this week, we came across an abundant amount of mothers and calves, sometimes three pairs in the same area. Some are very young calves that are predicted to have been born just a few weeks ago and others that clearly had grown almost twice their original size and now were well on their way to being ready for the migration north.

The winds shifted on Wednesday from the northwest to the southeast, but the seas remained moderate and the visibility held. One morning our tenders followed a small rowdy group off the bank and out of the protection from the reef. The seas were climbing to almost five feet as our tender rolled between wave crests and worked to track the rowdy group. Eventually it became too difficult to stay alongside the fighting males so we turned around and made our way back into the protected area. On the way, however, one of the guests spotted a very long line floating on the surface. We made our way over, and realizing that this line was indeed wrapped around a coral head, we prepared to get into the water to remove the entirety of the line. After picking up approximately 400 feet of floating line we had to dive down fifteen feet to cut it away from where it had lodged itself into the coral. Lines are lost at sea every day and become a real problem for the humpback whales. Entanglement is thought to be the number one cause of premature mortality and lines just like this one become way too easy for a calf to get caught up in, so for us to be able to remove lost lines like this from their environment is very important and rewarding work.

Thanks to the visibility holding and perhaps some good karma for removing the lost line, our week was full of amazing in-water encounters. One in particular stands out as we spent almost four hours with the same mother and calf pair. Tendering around the coral heads we worked with a mother, calf and escort. She, the mother, didn’t appear to want to settle; she would hang for awhile at the surface and stay sometimes long enough for us to do a flyby, but the escort continued to push her and kept her moving away. Eventually though, the escort swam off and the mother started to settle. The first time we entered the water with her she was resting at the bottom while her calf, who appeared to be much older than four or five weeks, played at the surface. The calf was restless and did not stay at the mother’s side long. We watched from the surface as the calf came up over and over again, sometimes swimming far distances from the mother, breaching completely out of the water, only to come back again and check out the guests. Eventually, the calf had traveled too far for comfort and the mother began to call her back by lob tailing, tail breaching and fin slapping to get the calf’s attention.

This happens often around this time of the year as the calves become a little more confident and the mothers grow slightly more intolerant of their behaviour, calling them back when they stray too far. Later when the pair picked up another escort, the female again began to breach, but this time directly in front of the tender… and then followed up by the escort breaching. A double spinning head breach by two adults! Beautiful. 

Leaving the mooring on our last day to head back to Puerto Plata, the sunrise made the water glow violet and rays of golden light lit the ships as well as the flukes of a mother and calf just behind our tender that were lob tailing, as if to say goodbye to our guests.

Every Friday when we get back to port, the entire Aquatic Adventures crew and the guests on board will go to our favorite local restaurant, Los Tres Cocos. Here the food is expertly prepared by an Austrian chef, who can accommodate all dietary needs. The restaurant itself is a thatched roof, open concept space with a courtyard under bamboo, palms and orchids. It’s tucked away in the Dominican jungle and the owner, Michi, always goes above and beyond with his hospitality. This will be our last visit to the Los Tres Cocos for the season, and already we are looking forward to next year when we will visit again. 

The Aquatic Adventures team hopes that you are as inspired as we are to help sustain the humpback whale population. Through our partnership with the Center for Coastal Studies, we are helping to gain critical information on these charismatic creatures, and to seek ways to protect and preserve them. To find out more about this effort, join their mailing list or to make a donation, large or small, please visit: www.coastalstudies.org/aquaticadventures

We are proud to support SeaLegacy in their efforts to create powerful media to change the narrative around our world’s oceans. Their mission is to inspire the global community to protect our oceans. To learn more about SeaLegacy and help with this important mission, please visit: https://www.sealegacy.org

Thanks to all who have generously donated!

Learn more about Aquatic Adventures here.

Written by: Aquatic Adventures team member Gillian Morin
Edited by: Aquatic Adventures team member Heather Reser 
Images: Aquatic Adventures