Summer Breeze Daily Reports - July 4,  2005

Position on 07/04/2005, 02:49 UTC; 29 07.656N; 087 04.487W

We managed to track the group of whales we had encountered yesterday throughout the night. Fortunately, they made our job relatively easy, since they continued to click regularly for most of the night, and pauses in vocalizations were brief and far between. At some point, we had tracked them that closely that we could hear their blows somewhere to the starboard of our vessel. We wondered what, upon hearing these strange sounds people in the old days must have felt, not knowing what produced them… To us, these blows indicated that we were literally on the right track.

Risso's Dolphin or "Grampus" is rarely seen close-in in larger vessels - one of several animals photographed from the Summer Breeze

The animals moved about 20 nautical miles in an almost straight line towards the north-east. Once again, their orientation mirrored that of the continental slope. Since we were that close to the whales all night, we got the first ID photo just after daylight, at 6:30 local time.

We worked with these whales all day, obtaining 15 ID photos. They kept clicking and fluking regularly all day, while continuing their north-eastward movement. They did not join in groups and socialize at all while we were with them today. After a first glimpse at the photos, we had five or six animals in the area (several IDs show a very smooth fluke, which may or may not belong to the same individual).

By 16:00 winds had increased to above 20 knots, seas became too rough to continue staying with this group and we decided to leave them. In light of the threatening tropical storm to the south and west, we agreed on surveying eastward. In contrast to our original plan to survey block 2 on this leg, we will now work in block 1, since the group of whales has taken us to the east already and to avoid the fringes of the storm as much as possible.