By Mike Busch
The Long Island Sun Chasers arranged for a group outing with Gotham Whale on the American Princess out of Breezy Point on Saturday, September 30.
If you have never spent the afternoon with them looking for whales and dolphins within sight of New York City I highly recommend it.
I have been out about 5 times with them and featured a few of last year’s trips here and here.
The forecast was for a chance of rain and a stiff breeze out of the North East but with excellent visibility and some recent whale reports everybody was pumped.
We pushed off the dock at Riis Landing in Breezy Point at Noon with about 40 sun chasers and another 30 or so regular customers.
The American Princess is a big, clean and comfortable 95 footer that can hold up to 250 passengers so getting a spot to relax or shoot is never a problem.
Another unique aspect to these trips is you never leave the New York City backdrop, even if the whales don’t cooperate you will still end up with some unique shots of the city from some new angles.
On all my prior trips, it normally takes a while to find the whales but on Saturday we ran into a large Humpback less than 30 minutes from the dock with Coney Island as a backdrop. Gotham Whale catalogs each whale by unique markings on the Fluke and Artie Raslich (Gotham’s Photographer), immediately determined this was a new whale.
Continued on pages 2, 3 and 4