Nouvelle-Calédonie: Whale Watching

First view when we arrived in the morning - hurray! ;)

As we didn´t see any whales during our last sailing trip, we decided to pay for a trip organized by experts! It is already the end of the pairing season but there is still a high chance to see whales.

And to be honest… When I first thought of our trip I imagined a sunny day, a blue sky, me lying on a catamaran observing whales while getting tanned, haha. As you can already see from the fist picture it was not like that ;) We were not that lucky with the weather but happy that they did not cancel the trip. So, in fact it was a very cloudy, windy and especially rainy day...

Thus rain cape instead of bikini!

The true story about our whale watching tour - according to my experience ;)

First of all I have to say that we were really lucky because we saw many whales - yay! Actually I didn´t expect that! On the other hand it was a very exhausting day (getting up 4.30am, spending more than 6hours under these weather conditions at sea). In addition, the half of the crew got seasick, even the captain´s wife. They were not even able to watch the sea but rather vomiting... I guess some did not even see one single whale but they also did not even care about them any longer... ;)

For my own part, I can say that I was really happy to see these impressive animals in the wild - some great moments I will surely never forget. Besides that I also had some moments when I felt really bad and seasick. But I did not vomit his time ;)

Baie de la somme

Eskimo-style

First signs - they are there!

Humpback whale pictures

It was quite difficult to take pictures of them. The boat was shaking heavily, it was stormy and raining.

I had problems to keep the balance on the boat and I was afraid to damage my good Nikon Camera. Moreover, it was almost impossible to catch the right moment to take nice pictures. The whales stayed just a few seconds on the water surface and appeared sometimes out of nowhere.

Anyway, I tried my best and I finally got some shots!

But I actually didn´t catch the best moments - a whale mommy with her baby AND the VERY BEST a whale jumping out of the water, with his whole body! That was just amazing and breathtaking!