Humpback Breaching 8/20/25
This morning after I posted that there was a whale near the pier, my friend Tony wrote a comment saying he was looking at my livecam and saw a big splash off the end of the pier. I headed up to the roof to survey the scene and after a few minutes saw a big splash out of the corner of my eye. I started sending an update to that effect when I saw a whale breach just south of the pier. I let out an exclamation that unfortunately was easily heard on the livecams, dashed downstairs to grab my camera and head out to try and catch a shot. I was worried I might miss it, so I stopped on my porch first to see if I could get a shot. No sooner had I turned the camera on, it beached again and I snapped away. I checked that I got the shot, then dashed down to the beach. At first I thought that shot from the porch would be the only one because the whale went quiet for a while. But then it started back up and just breached over-and-over. I photographed 18 separate breaching sequences, and I know I missed at least 3 before I got my camera, and missed another one while I was out there. So that whale breached at least 22 times, which is an extraordinary expenditure of energy.
I did my best to narrow it down to the best few breaches, and the best few shots. There’s a lot of pretty good stuff left on the cutting room floor, but I think this mostly represents what I saw.
