Our 2nd Migaloo Sighting

And we got lucky again! Our 2nd Migaloo sighting since we saw him last in 2014.

This time we were expecting him as he was seen a few days prior further north, so we had a rough idea when he may come past Sydney.

Of course it was still down to luck as we based his arrival in Sydney on an average speed that he might swim at, but he could speed up, slow down, come past during the night, be 20km out to sea etc..

But here we were, right in the middle of the window of Migaloo potentially coming past, watching whales somewhere around Bondi when i noticed a splash a few miles further north.

We decided to investigate as a) our whales were not the most exciting and b) it might just be him, right??

Once we arrived in the area where we thought our mystery whale might be, we started waiting for him to return to the surface. We waited 5 minutes which is usually the average time for whales to be underwater for. No sign of any whale anywhere…

10 minutes into our wait i got a phone call. It was the skipper of another whale watching boat who asked me if we are watching Migaloo. Someone called him who had been watching Migaloo from land and apparently we were in that area. I said we are waiting for a whale with a long downtime we saw from the distance, but have not seen Migaloo yet.

In hindsight it was a shame that i got that phone call, because it robbed me of the surprise seeing him pop up after a long down time. There was no mistaking him, glowing bright white lit up by the afternoon sun..

He continued to have 10min + down times, but swam pretty consistently, so he was easy to track.

Our 3hr Cruise which i was on had to go back into the harbour, but i managed to literally jump ship onto our smaller 2hr cruise to stay with him until the sun set.

Here is to a 3rd sighting, hopefully with a breach next time around 🙂