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Summer Breeze Daily Reports - June 26, 2005

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Position at 27.48  90.37

We kept on monitoring regularly throughout last night and stopped only for about an hour this morning, when we sat out a rain squall. Once out of that, we kept moving slowly west in long north-west and south-west legs. Finally, just before 16:00 local time, we picked up clicks and soon after saw the first blows. The weather wasn’t exactly helpful with constant winds above 15 knots and frequent white caps, which made detecting blows rather difficult. Nevertheless, we spotted several whales at the surface. However, the first couple of times the whales fluked before we could get to them, again due to the heavy seas. Once in the area where the first whales had fluked, we kept spotting blows and now were close enough to approach the whales in time to obtain photo-ID shots (see photo 1). Our estimate is that there were four animals in this dispersed group. A first glance at the photos shows at least three different individuals.

Photograph of a whale fluking up ("tail" up out of the water).

Photo 1: One of the whales fluking up before we were in the right position. Note the notch in the trailing edge of the right side of the fluke. We did get a proper ID photo of this whale later in the day.

Photo 2: One of the whales fluking in front of platform A (Genesis).

As of midnight, we are still tracking at least one of the whales from this group, intending to stay with it through the night. If we manage this, we plan to follow this group until we have a good estimate of the group size and can be confident that we have identified all members of the group.

We picked up the group in the vicinity of the platform A (Genesis), Photo 2, and at the moment, we are still only 6.5 nautical miles west from that structure.

 



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