Woody Head whale-watching

Author: josh

Category: Trip Reports

Created on Saturday, 23 October 2010 19:30

Written by Josh

With such perfect conditions for open water kayaking & sailing I wasn't at all surprised to note 2 TI sails silloetted on the horizon when I arrived at Woody Head today, a good 2 hours later than I'd planned to. As I was heading out Nathan Rogers was heading back in on his Hibiscus TI, coming back for supplies as well as to put a perfect pan-sized snapper on ice. 'Dad's further out - I'll be back soon,' he told me as I set sail for Nick's direction. By the time I'd reached Nick in his papaya TI he'd caught a few bonito, but otherwise had little to report, other than some nice sailing and humpback activity in the distance. 

It wasn't long before Nathan had rejoined us, at which point we took off to the north, trolling over familiar territory and back into the area where Nathan had hooked up earlier. Soon after we got there we were distracted by leaping humpbacks in the distance, some 3 - 4 km out at first sighting. By now we'd figured out that the fishing was looking to be fairly quiet, so why not go forth and do some whale watching instead? So we set sail to the north on my recomendation that they would head towards us and cross our paths. I couldn't have been more right. 

On approach at one point (about 2km from contact) we began discussing how we would do our best to stay a good safe distance at all times. We all had the very best of intentions to keep our distance, but when I suggested we zig to the west a tad I didn't realise quite how good a job I'd done of steering us into the path of the whales. I found out less than a minute later when they appeared right next to me. In those first few moments there was a lot of activity, with a mother and calf surfacing next to me, at least one more whale surfacing next to Nathan. Radio chatter was high with excitement when they appeared, particularly when it became apparent that Nath had drifted into the path of the first two whales that appeared next to me. Right at the very moment that it became clearly apparent that the whale was going to swim underneath him, he was frantically reeling in his lure. 

The whale passed underneath him with incident though as he managed to get his line out of harms way just in time. By now all our lines were clear and we were able to enjoy the moment, which carried on for what felt like another hour, as the whales leirsurely made their way in a southerly direction. We were able to keep pace with them easily, hanging back at a safe distance which for the most part was really easy ti judge. At one point, however, as I watched Nick with said whales in the background I observed a dark object followed by a fin surface near the bow of his yak, then submerge as he sailed directly over it. Nick saw it to, turning towards me with a big grin a thumbs up. That wasn't a whale though - this one was a shark, of around 10' long. Most likely a tiger we later decided, maybe a bronzie. It didn't hang around, nor demonsrtrate any behaviour remotely classed as threatening. Nick got a much better look at it than I did, but we both agreed it's dorsal fin was at least a foot tall from the water. 

Eventually the whales got bored of us and moved further to the Sth east so we decided to refocus on fishing, which turned out to be utterly futile. We did find some baitfish in a couple of the usual suspect places, but no more action came our way.