The Today Show goes whalewatching with Gotham Whale!

So I've sadly had to hit the pause button on Project Seize the Summer here in August due to immovable deadlines both work- and self-imposed - but there's always living vicariously through Facebook, right? I haven't made it out whalewatching yet this year, but I've been following the summer's fun on the FB pages of NYC whalewatching boat American Princess, marine mammal photographer extraordinaire Artie Raslich, and Gotham Whale, the not-for-profit that's dedicated to spreading the news about the whales that have returned to our local waters.

For me, the photo above was the introduction to Gotham Whale - it went viral among the local recreational water users a couple of years ago, with much debate over whether it was Photoshopped or not; fortunately Artie puts his copyright mark on his photos so it was easy to find him, and after the quickest of Google searches I was completely convinced and made my first post about Gotham Whale. It's actually kind of entertaining to read that post again now that I've been friends with them for a while!

Anyways, they've been having a really good summer out there, lots of whales and dolphins, and earlier this week they were featured on the Today Show!

Want to go see the whales of the NY bight for yourself? Visit AmericanPrincessCruises.com for schedule and reservations. 

Gotham Whale on WNYC's The Takeaway

The Takeaway's Oliver Lazarus interviews Gotham Whale founder Paul Siesweirda

Congratulations to the folks at Gotham Whale on an excellent radio piece on The Takeaway, a show produced by our local NPR station WNYC. I'd actually meant to do a couple more posts about my November 5th whalewatching trip on the American Princess; I didn't get any very good whale photos but there were a couple of very interesting activities on board, one of which was Takeaway producer Oliver Lazarus gathering material for this show! 

Click here to listen. I was a little disappointed that my friend John (the storm chaser kayaking friend I mentioned in my last post) didn't make it in, but having to condense a four hour boat ride down to ten minutes meant having to focus pretty tightly on the aspects they chose to feature. I think they did a great job of giving the listener a real sense of what it's like to be part of one of these amazing NYC whalewatching excursions - and I so admired the eloquence of fellow passenger Edie!

2017 Black Friday Bonus Escape 2 - Gotham Whale!

Gotham...

Whale...

Gotham Whale!

Fun to find that I actually got a photo of a whale with NYC in the background! World Trade Center and other downtown buildings just to the left of the vapor cloud from the spout, Empire State Building just to the right of the whale.

This was an unexpected pleasure - I'd gone out on the American Princess a couple of weeks ago on a bit of a whim, and we had a pretty amazing day with five or six or maybe seven whales. I posted about it, and my friend Jenn saw it and said something about going sometime. Now, she's working in Calgary these days so I assumed "sometime" meant sometime in 2018, but it turned out that she was coming back to Brooklyn for Thanksgiving, so the 3 extra trips the boat was able to add at the end of November were possible. We ended up getting tickets for the last trip of the AP's whalewatching season. TQ has Sundays off for the winter, so that worked for him, and we were also joined by Jenn's husband, and also Capt. Kat, my old friend from the days when I was working on the Schooner Adirondack, who is the mutual friend through whom Jenn and I met when Kat took us for an incredible midsummer sailing trip in the Gulf of Finland a few years back.

 It was a beautiful breezy day with kitesurfers having a blast at Breezy Point, tons of birds, a wide assortment of boats, a good mirage, a gorgeous sunset and one very quiet whale taking an afternoon nap. :) Interesting whale fact from the Gotham Whale naturalists on board - whales only sleep with half of their brain at a time so they can be aware of their surrounding and keep coming up for air as needed. When a whale sleeps like this it's called "logging"; sometimes they will rest on the surface; this one was mostly submerged but coming up for leisurely breaths every couple of minutes.

You just never knew where the whale was going to come up and it got pretty close to the boat, so for once I got some pretty good photos, plus of course lots from the trip out and back. Click here to visit my Flickr album from the day. I'm still a bit blown away that this is all going on out there.

American Princess trip 11/5/17 continued - "Thar She Blows!"

Yesterday's post about what I did when I got to the whalewatching boat really, really early on November 5th ended with ""One good urban wildlife sighting down - hello Princess, let's go find more!", and that's exactly what we did! It was a wonderful day out on the water, gray and ever so slightly drizzly, as the forecast had said, but in that way that I actually find very atmospheric, with constantly shifting layers of clouds and fogs. There were so many birds, lots and lots of gannets doing their spectacular dives (everybody loves menhaden) and gulls, plus speeding strings of the winter ducks who are arriving from their northern breeding grounds around this time of year. The rain had probably kept a lot of people home, so the boat wasn't too crowded, which is nice for the passengers who do make it. There were a couple of particularly interesting things that went on on board, but I'll do another post about those. The water was so quiet inside Breezy Point, then got very bouncy as we left the shelter of the Rockaway Peninsula.

It took a while to find the whales, but I was enjoying relaxing and watching the scenery and the birds as we headed east along the coast, and, finally after a couple of hours, a pod of dolphins was spotted -- and instantly forgotten when the captain sang out "There she blows!". We spent the next hour or so (I think, I stopped looking at my watch once we found the whales) admiring five or six or maybe even seven humpbacks. Absolutely wonderful!

Here are more pictures from the day - click for a slideshow view. Looking forward to another trip this coming weekend, hope the whales come out to be admired again!

Want to learn more about these big-city cetaceans? Visit GothamWhale.org!