Jervis Bay Whales

Jervis Bay is turning out to be a splendid place. We came here with zero expectations, except that we had heard that it was an under-valued cruising destination a long day south of Sydney.

Frankly, it has stunned us so much that we've decided to pass up some perfectly good weather for heading north, just to hang around and enjoy the place.

There will be other blog posts about the swimming and beaches, but this one is just about the whales. As you will have gathered we've seen quite a few whales since rounding the corner at Gabo Island - I would say 30 to 50, or more. However the closest and clearest we have seen them (apart from the one we nearly hit near Gabo Island) is in Jervis Bay. They seem to come in here to frolic and generally show off - much to the delight of the whale-watch tour operators, I'll bet.

Well, today we were minding our own business just sailing across Jervis Bay from West to East in about 5 knots of wind when, all of a sudden, we had whales around us. There were 3 of them and, we reckon, they were definitely a Mum, a Dad, and a baby calf.

We carried on across the bay, thinking they'd just wander off, but they didn't. Instead they started wacking their fins on the water, waving their tales in the air, and even performing a couple of very spectacular "breaches". All this action attracted the commercial whale watching boats and a couple of small fishing boats which also stopped by to watch the show.

Mum and calf, cruising along.

Dad.

One of the whale watching tour boats

These guys thought maybe they might catch one...?

Dad, putting on a show

What goes up... must make a massive splash!

About this time all the other boats pushed off and left us to our gentle 5 knot drift. The whales however seemed to have other ideas. Perhaps they were perplexed by this boat that didn't make the horrible whiny noises the other boats did, or perhaps they just didn't know we were there at all...!? In any case, as we sailed on towards the Eastern shore the whales moved across on a collision course.

What to do?

Well, we figured they were pretty smart creatures, and WAY faster and more manouverable than we are, so we just pretty much sailed on and held our course...

Dad cruises across to intercept us

Hmmm. This is getting close.

Fin waving sequence at a close, but respectable, distance.

...until things got too close for comfort (about 1 boat length away seems to be the edge of my comfort zone) when we turned sharply away to at least keep out of flipper range!

Now less than 1 boat length (10m) away. That fin is WAY taller than we are!

Hmm. Not a good angle. Is this is a Humpback doing a Killer Whale impersonation?

After a bit of flipper waving, and some deep breathing, the whale family were on their way again. And we continued to find a delightful beach in a military weapons firing range, but that is a story for another day...

OK, some digital cropping and zooming of an earlier photo, but this is what we're glad we DIDN'T get to see close up. That whale is about 1.5x the length of our boat!