Shortly after passing Breezy Point and heading into the Ocean we started seeing huge bunker pods and some fish crashing the bait at the surface, always a great sign.
Bunker (Menhaden)
As we looked for our first whale, I saw 3 stealthy boats speeding toward the city. I wasn’t sure what they were but after cropping the photos at home, they appear to be new assault speedboats used by the U.S. Navy Seals. I found an article about them here.
After steaming and scanning the horizon for about an hour, we noticed Captain Tom on the radio, perhaps getting a fresh report of a whale. He quickly sped the boat up and made a bee-line toward Sandy Hook N.J. Once we arrived we stopped and waited for about 15 minutes near the ship Channel until we had a Humpback lunge feed about 100 yards in front of the boat. We had our Whale, and for the next few hours were treated to some incredible action with multiple lunge feeds, a wild tail slap sequence and a full breach with the whale completely out of the water! Every whale is different and I found this one very difficult to photograph. The whale didn’t follow any particular pattern and was incredibly fast.
Continued on Page 3
