Cape Cod Right (*)

* - Technically, we did not see a right whale on this cruise.

For a second adventure during our Cape Cod vacation, I looked into a whale watch cruise.  They are offered out of several harbors on the cape, including Falmouth, Hyannis, and Provincetown.  Although there was a bit of a drive up to Provincetown, Mary and I decided to take our cruise from there on the Dolphin Fleet.  They have a fairly comprehensive website at http://www.whalewatch.com/dolphinfleet/.

After you get on board, the naturalist that accompanies each of the Dophin Fleet cruises begins an orientation tour with safety rules, followed with a list and description of the types of wildlife that could potentially be encountered.  Here are photos of Mary and me just after boarding (taken by a vacationing Brit, we returned the favor for him and his wife, and then saw them strolling around Chatham the next day) and a photo of one of the boats as we left the harbor.

The types of whales that you might see during these cruises include the baleen species right whales, humpback, and finback; also pilot whales and dolphins.  There is a finback photo at the top of this post; we encountered two of them just offshore before we were even clear of the P-town peninsula.  I took the lighthouse photo just after we saw them.

For unusual fish speicies, there is the mola mola or sunfish, and the basking shark, and we saw two each of them, but I did not get photos of them since they were on the other side of the boat. 

Watching the finbacks was quite fascinating - they are the second largest animals on the planet, after blue whales.  They typically have a streamlined, slender build, reaching up to 90 feet in length, and weighing as much at 150,000 pounds.  I took a little time to comprehend this concept, because the whale feeds on plankton - small - microscopic - plants.  Also they can live to be nearly one hundred years old.

After the encounter with the finbacks, we cruised north into protected waters for about a half hour and searched for other animals.  That's where we saw the mola molas, or sunfishes, and the basking sharks. 

Eventually we ended up amongst a large group of dolphins.  There were dozens of them visible on the surface, including this small pod that was at the front of the boat for a while. The estimated count of dolphins in the area was 150.  They did some of the typical performances you might expect from them - high leaps as singles, and some as pairs; then the pilot steered the boat around to make a steep wake and a few of them jetted into the high wave and then exploded out of the surf into the air.  It's easy to see why they hold such a vivid place in the imagination, since they are so gregarious.

So, yeah, this was a very touristy thing to do...but it's not something we would set out to do every time we go up to the cape.  It was a very worthwhile thing to do once...although, if we are ever up during humpback season, it might be worth a second go to encounter them.