9/14/2024 - Cape May Pelagic: Blue Whale, Manta Rays, Brown Booby
This past Friday I drove down to Cape May for a 24 hour pelagic trip. This was my third attempt for an overnight trip this year. The previous two were cancelled due to weather and there were two other trips which I was unavailable. This one was set to sail, and we left at 9 pm. We reached our destination, Spencer Canyon, about 80 miles out, sometime after 5:30 am Saturday. The day started out rather slow with some Wilson’s storm-petrels scattered around the area. Action around the boat didn’t really start to pick up until later in the morning.
The first interesting sighting was a small group of young Atlantic spotted dolphins. They were young enough to not yet bear their namesake spots, which delayed their initial identification. Until they start showing spots they might be confused with bottlenose dolphins. These dolphins had a tricolored body and white-tipped beaks to help differentiate them from the bottlenose species.
Spotted dolphins, sans spots. © S. Weiss
These dolphins usually start showing spots after a few years, yet some mature adults also lack the species' characteristic spotting pattern.
Pilot whales. © S. Weiss
Birds slowly began appearing around us. Little by little shearwater numbers grew during the day. A sub adult brown booby came upon the boat, making several passes before continuing on its way to some other destination. This was not my first brown booby, but my first pelagic one.
Brown booby. © S. Weiss
Shearwaters soon became the dominate bird species for the day. At one point in the middle of the day we came upon an upwelling of bait that attracted dozens and dozens of shearwaters. The bulk of them were great shearwaters with lesser numbers of Cory’s shearwaters in the mix. Even a late lingering sooty shearwater was spotted on the water. The uptick in activity at that location attracted a long-tailed jaeger looking for an easy meal. At one point the roles reversed and some shearwaters chased it away. Later we had a pomarine jaeger quickly flew by without making an anticipated return inspection of the boat. Later in the day, spotters picked out a few distant Manx shearwaters. A few other notable avian species we saw were Audubon’s shearwater, band-rumped storm-petrels and both red and red-necked phalaropes.
But for me, and many other passengers, the marine life stole the day. A pod of offshore bottlenose dolphins swam with the boat for awhile. The offshore population is bigger and darker than the inshore population.
Common bottlenose dolphins, offshore population. © S. Weiss
Then there were whales. It took awhile before we spotted our first whale, but at one point we easily had over a half dozen whales spouting in our view across a wide area. They were all, from what we could identify, fin whales. They are the second largest animal on earth. They are indifferent to boats and gave us quite the showing.
Fin whales. © S. Weiss
Left, the whale’s eye is just above the water line next to its lower jaw. Right, white blaze across the whale’s back just behind its blow hole, is a characteristic color feature of fin whales on their right sides.
The top two sightings of the day for me were personal bucket list moments and, as my luck would have it, missed photo opportunities. While we were tracking some whales, waiting for one to resurface, a giant manta ray came leaping clear from the water and belly flopped back down not far from the boat. The spectacular National Geographic moment caused a collective “Whoa!” to erupt from the crowd. No one was expecting that, and I’m pretty sure no one got a photo of it. Within seconds after that, still completely unexpected, the fish did it again! All cameras were locked and loaded for a third breach, yet it never came. Earlier we had seen a sicklefin devil ray swimming near the surface. The devil ray grows to about 8-10 feet wide while the manta ray grows to over 25 feet wide.
Left, giant manta ray (Courtesy of NOAA Fisheries).
Right, sicklefin devil ray, June 2024. © S. Weiss
Later, another whale was being tracked and its identification peaked the attention of the crew and onboard marine mammal naturalists. The whale’s very large size, its mottled coloring and some early photographs were signaling that this particular creature was not another fin whale, but the even larger blue whale. Yes, the largest animal to have ever lived on earth. My attention had been elsewhere, so I was a little late to the show, but got one decent look at the whale as it began a dive. I saw its back half, and it was quite long. It was more bluish than either gray or black with some obvious mottling. I noticed its dorsal fin, close to the tail, was very small. It looked almost like a nub. I commented to someone standing next to me that it appeared as if is barely had any fin. The fin was atypical of a fin whale, and for a whale that size, it was more diagnostic of a blue whale. It dove down without raising its tail. We waited and waited. I pleaded to God to myself to please have it surface again. It never did.
We waited about 25 minutes or so for it to resurface, which is quite a long time for a baleen whale to hold its breath. If it were up to me, we would have stayed out there searching for it until dark. Fortunately for some of the exhausted and under-the-weather passengers, I was not the captain. Though they are cosmopolitan, inhabiting all of the world’s oceans, a blue whale off of New Jersey is a very rare sighting. This was the first for me and the first one recorded by the Cape May Whale & Research Center vessel. For decades I have always wanted to see a live blue whale, ever since I was a child. I was not even ten years old when I saw the model of one hanging from the ceiling at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Over half a century later I finally saw one.
There is so much life out there, so much to see. There are days like this, and sometimes there are days where the ocean seems to be a desert. You never know what you will see each time out, but I know I would never have seen these if I stayed home.
*****
One of several flying fish seen during the day. © S. Weiss
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