Nowadays, where the whales are, people are close behind. You never know. I used to run the boat 200 trips a year, and two trips are never alike. Winter, they teach science in the public schools. She explains that finding a whale, resting and still, is a little like shucking a mound of oysters and finding a pearl.
Humpbacks make up most of the whale population off Massachusetts.
A week before this, the Hyannis Whale Watcher came upon a Northern right whale, among the most endangered of the whales, Melinda says. Vessels must stay a quarter mile away from a Northern right, but the Hyannis Whale Watcher crew decided that even that was a risk, so the whale remained a distant, unfulfilled rush of anticipation for the visitors. So many whale-watching boats ply the planet's seas that maritime scientists worry about a generation of whales that will face new problems because their hearing is damaged by the noise of engines. If the Hyannis Whale Watcher is any indication, this is not taken lightly. At 110 feet, the boat is the same length as the largest blue whale ever spotted in Cape waters, on May 2, 1993.