From “the”, wonderful photos of a humpback whale. Exciting! Click for full size.

1) What one sees most of the time: just a large, humped back after it surfaces, blows, inhales, and does a shallow dive.

2) Showing its flukes – normally (always?) seen just before a deep dive (when it will feed). This is one of the species’ signatures, almost no other large species shows the tail consistently before sounding.

3) …and, every once in a while, a tour will be very, very lucky, and see the whale perform a series of saltos like this; it did this about 7-8 times in a row, this was the only one I caught clearly (despite the evidently calm seas, it wasn’t entirely flat – the boat was doing irregular “pitches” of about 50 cm in amplitude).  Just breathtaking.

Photos taken off St. Anthony, NL, Canada, July 28 2016.

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