Whales of the Silver Bank

[beau_gust]

Hi, folks,

My wife and I recently took a trip on the Turks and Caicos Aggressor to the Silver Bank of the Dominican Republic. This is the largest breeding and birthing place of humpback whales in the Atlantic. The DR has a very thoughtful policy for allowing people to associate with the whales in the Silver Bank preserve. Only two boats (each carrying 20 passengers max) are allowed for five days of the week into the preserve. No scuba is allowed, but snorkeling is permitted in certain circumstances; they call them "soft-in-water" encounters.

The whale expeditions involved riding around in rigid floor inflatable boats at slow speeds trying to find whales. The way you find them is (usually) by spotting "spouts". When not fin slapping or breaching (i.e., most of the time) the whales don't rise very high out of the water, so the spouts are the only things visible from more than 100 yards.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v499/beaugust/KurtsWhales/TharSheBlows.jpg


Fortunately, the calves have to breathe pretty often, and the adults blow fairly often as well when swimming on the surface. Since we wanted to do more than follow the whales around, we were primarily interested in mother-calf pairs.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v499/beaugust/KurtsWhales/MotherAndCalf-1.jpg


With luck, we'd find one where the mother got sleepy and decided to take a nap. In that case, we could get in the water with them. We would swim to the mother and try to stay near her head, so she could see us. If she was comfortable that we were not a danger to her calf, then she would let it come to the surface. Like all youngsters, the calves were playful, usually spending some time splashing around on the surface before returning to mother.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v499/beaugust/KurtsWhales/BabyInBubbles.jpg


And like all youngsters, they are curious and would frequently come to check us out.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v499/beaugust/KurtsWhales/whaleface.jpg

(continued next post)

[beau_gust]

They wouldn't always approach too closely (drat!), but did keep an eye on us...

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v499/beaugust/KurtsWhales/babyprofile.jpg


Then, they'd return to mother and slip under her fin. The water was somewhat murky; I could not ever get the camera to lock focus on the scene, but it was cool to watch the mother stroking the baby with her humoungous fin. The mother-child bond was obvious even for the uneducated eye.

Eventually, mom would need to breathe too, and mother and calf would surface together.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v499/beaugust/KurtsWhales/MotherAndCalf.jpg


She'd breathe a few times, then swim a little ways off (when we were lucky) to rest again. Capt. Piers had told us how the calves would swim in their mother's slipstream, sort of "drafting" mom to save effort.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v499/beaugust/KurtsWhales/Slipstream.jpg


But sometimes, mom wouldn't settle down. This was especially true when she had an escort (male whale with dreams of getting lucky), and even more especially when their was a challenger (a second male whale with the same dreams, and delusions of adequacy). We were lucky to motor along one such quadruple one day, when the males decide it was time to show each other how they would slap the snot out of the other one if necessary.

We called this whale "#2", due to the numeral-shaped scar on his pectoral fin.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v499/beaugust/KurtsWhales/finslap.jpg

[beau_gust]

#2 demonstrating his two-handed technique

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v499/beaugust/KurtsWhales/DoubleSlap.jpg


Children naturally imitate the adults in their lives, so they would also fin slap and tail lob

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v499/beaugust/KurtsWhales/WhaleTaile2.jpg


After we'd enjoyed our time with them, the whales would ditch us by diving deeper and changing direction. Sometimes, that deeper dive would be signaled to us when they'd wave goodby with their tails.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v499/beaugust/KurtsWhales/WhaleTail.jpg


All in all, it was an awesome week, which we will definitely do again. Hope you enjoy the pictures. Comments or critiques are welcome.

[sorvju-f]

#2 demonstrating his two-handed technique



I cant find the words....(positive)...I can only ask how it feels to meet these underwater?

Jukka

[Clay Coleman]

Wow, thanks for sharing. Great stuff! -Clay

[tarczy]

Kurt-

Great shots!!

Looks like you had fabulous weather and an all around great trip. You were on one of the best liveaboards sailing the Caribbean - Turks & Caicos Aggressor II - and Piers is one of my most favorite Captains. I wish I was there!!

Thanks for sharing. If you wouldn't mind, could you please post the camera equipment you used along with some EXIF data for the underwater shots - like ISO, aperture and shutter speed? :) :) :) :)

[Jonathan Bird]

Fantastic report! Thanks for sharing! Great shots. You did better than I did in the DR a few years ago. I never really got close enough for decent shots.

Birdman

[beau_gust]

Kurt-

Great shots!!

Looks like you had fabulous weather and an all around great trip. You were on one of the best liveaboards sailing the Caribbean - Turks & Caicos Aggressor II - and Piers is one of my most favorite Captains. I wish I was there!!

Thanks for sharing. If you wouldn't mind, could you please post the camera equipment you used along with some EXIF data for the underwater shots - like ISO, aperture and shutter speed? :) :) :) :)

Thanks. I agree with your assessment of T&C Aggressor II and Capt. Piers. As for the fabulous weather, we were stuck in port for 2 days due to high winds and 14 foot seas. But at least it was mostly sunny; we heard that it had rained pretty much constantly for the previous two weeks. I suspect that seeing spouts through a hard rain would be difficult.

All shots taken with a 20D in an Ikelite housing, with natural light. For surface shots, I used my old EF75-300mm IS lens, trying to keep the zoom under 200 mm. Underwater, I used the EFS 10-22mm, between about 14 and 22 mm.

Surface shots were generally taken with aperture priority, with the aperture set to give a minimum of 1/400 shutter speed when metering on the blue water (Pier's recommendation). ISO generally 100, unless I needed to bump it to 200, and sometimes 400, to be able to keep the shutter speed up. 1/400th was necessary just because of the fact that both the whales and the RIB and the people in the RIB were all moving at once. I went for EV -1/3 stop to get the water bluer.

Underwater shots were taken with shutter priority, shutter set to 1/100. ISO was 200 (at least on the shots worth keeping). Aperture ended up as high as f/18, as low as f/8. I went for EV -1/3 for bluer water, but I'm not sure I'd do that again. The water was pretty murky, and the light was not always at the best angle (they'd try to line us up for best light, but keeping us in an upcurrent approach to the whales was higher priority, so we wouldn't drift down on to them.)

Jonathan, as for getting close, we were a little frustrated - the other RIB had better luck and longer encounters than we did. We had just one good day of in-water encounters, and even these were shorter than I had hoped. So I appreciate the compliment, and also the knowledge that it could have been worse.

[Jonathan Bird]

The DR is a very tough place to shoot humpbacks. Not many world-class humpback pics come out of the DR because of the viz and the stand-offish whales. I think you did pretty darned well! (My favorite is the one with teh whale pointing right at the camera! You don't see many shots like that. Cool!)

All the really great humpback shots I have seen have mostly come from Hawaii (most from Doug P, because he has a federal permit!!) and Tuvalu, Cook Islands, etc.

Jonathan