Whale Watching in Maui

koholā = whale

We had THE MOST AMAZING TIME whale watching on Wednesday, February 19th in Maui. Troy’s dad Bob and his wife Sharron came in on Monday night, had one day to recover from their journey from Mexico, and then we roused them for an early morning pop-over flight to the Valley Isle (time in the air – 20 minutes). We picked up a rental car, had a quick breakfast at a local diner and then stopped into the Io Valley. Last time we visited Io, River was 20-months old and it was heavy with clouds. Today, the needle was easy to spot, with bright robin-egg skies!

We made the drive from the airport in Kahului over to the boat ramp north of Lahaina easily (oh, Lahaina, you look so sad with your wasteland of concrete foundations and burnt shrubbery!). After killing time at a nearby shopping center, we met up with the crew at Makai Adventures for our 2-hour tour!

The captain and assistant were excellent, spotting whale activity, racing us over for the best view, and then explaining the behavior we were witnessing in terrific detail.

We got to see these beautiful creatures exhibit the whole gamut of behaviors, from spy-hopping to slapping their pectoral fins, to repeatedly tail-slapping. We didn’t see any do a full breach, but we saw dozens and dozens of whales (mamas, babies and “escorts”). The babies are awesome – they’re so curious and so they come right up to the boat (the photo of the whale spy-hopping above is a curious baby!) to investigate, and where baby goes, mama is right there, usually trying to get between the baby and the boat. One mama hung out underneath our boat for quite a while, and the water is so clear, you could see her entire body in detail.

After our incredible experience, we spent the rest of the afternoon in and around the Marriott in Ka’anapali, having tropical cocktails and watching the whales continue their play offshore, before we bopped back to O’ahu on a 7 p.m. flight 🙂