Whale Watching

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It’s been pretty windy and stormy in Sydney recently, and we’d been trying to book a trip to go whale watching from Darling Harbour for a few days, but each time we would check in the morning and the trip would be cancelled due to bad weather.
Today luck was on our side, and although it was a little overcast the wind wasn’t too high, so the trip was running. We got an early train into Sydney and found ourselves a coffee shop in Darling Harbour to grab a cuppa and banana bread whilst we called a few people to sort out viewing some flats for later in the day.

We got the 10.45 super fast whale watching experience – this was on a speed boat as opposed to the other option of the ferry – and we were warned before we boarded that we were likely to see a swell of at around 2 metres when we got out to sea, so this wasn’t for the faint hearted.

We positioned ourselves at the front seats on the boat – the most bumpy and windy position - and headed over to Manly to pick up more passengers, taking in views on the CBD, Harbour Bridge and the Opera House on the way. From there we headed north out to sea past Bondi. The skipper had a call from another whale watching boat whilst we were on the ride out saying they had seen a couple of hump back whales out near Coogee, so we headed towards that direction – experiencing the full force of the 2 metre swell on the way out.

The skipper slowed the boat as we got near and told us to look out for the distinctive ‘blow’ of the whale shooting out of the sea. It took a few minutes but we soon got our first sighting of mother and baby coming up to the surface for air. We were lucky that she had a calf with her as their lung capacity is much smaller and so they need to come up to the surface for air more regularly than the adults and Mum will always come up too to protect the calf. Their downtime was around 5 mins each time, but we would never know exactly where they were going to pop up next so the photography is a bit hit and miss as you’ll see from the photos we’ve added.

In summary we saw Mum, Auntie and Baby – they were travelling back down south past Sydney to Antarctic for the summer. We saw a tail slap, fluke dive and an amazing half breach as the whale took us by surprise and tried to take flight… that was the highlight of the trip!

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