Humpback soup

Spent the day fishing in Cover Pass.  Within ten minutes of our arrival we encountered our first humpback.  While getting our poles ready, we heard the distinctive sound of a humpback exhaling.  We were shocked to see a humpback approximately 20 feet off of our bow.  I immediately put the engine in neutral.  One or two minutes passed and the whale surfaced again within 20 to 30 feet of our boat on the left side.  It dove and gave us a very up close viewing of its flukes.  I have never been that close to a humpback whale's flukes before.  Our boat is 21 feet long.  The width of the whales flukes were at least half the length of our boat.  The experience got our hearts pumping!  

As we continued on we started observing spouting, humps, and flukes in almost every direction we looked.  Some were far our in the Clarence Strait, while others were close to Clover Pass.  We saw a mom and a calf, and we watched the calf breach.  We saw pectoral fins on the surface, and we were able to get a few good fluke photos.  We were able to photograph six individual whales, including the calf.  I was able to match the mom's fluke using alaskahumpbacks.org fluke catalog.  I hope to match some of the others as well.

It should be noted that the whales were not following NOAA regulations regarding safe whale viewing. We did our best to stay at least 100 yards away from them.