July 2024 Update – Peak Season Surprises

As we roll into July, everyone here at Whale Watching Sydney is excited. The height of the Northern Migration for our Humpbacks is well and truly under way. It’s been a busy few weeks here in the last half of June, and the frequency of action out on the humpback highway has been growing to an exciting crescendo. We expect to have some incredible experiences out on the water over the next few weeks.

Whale watching is always about expecting the unexpected, and last week had a perfect example. While we always head out with the highest of expectations, whale watching can occasionally involve a long search to begin with if the whales decided to spend a long time away from the surface. It’s this excitement of the search and the anticipation that makes the encounters even more rewarding and fulfilling, but it’s not uncommon to sometimes start to doubt if the whales are going to come out to play at all.

Having done countless tours, we know this is incredibly rare, but sometimes when the search is taking a while, you can start to wonder if anything will happen. We had a cruise very much like this last week. We had seen some beautiful pods of whales slowing making their way along the coast, and could see blows in all direction, but they were a long way off, a little too far to creach with the amount of time we had left.

We wanted to find some more active whales for everyone onboard, but it was starting to look like the top action was going to be nonexistent for the day. Our seasoned skipper, Jason, made the decision to head south to Bondi to try and get a last minute show, and we were lucky enough to spot a couple of whales travelling together closer to the shore. We had only minutes left before our cruise would have to end and the pod we were with didn’t seem like they wanted to show us much at all.

All of a sudden, the water surface exploded with the form of an airborne juvenile humpback! The young whale had surprised everyone. Coming from nowhere and breaching just meters from the boat, even the onboard photographers jumped in surprise as the crowd cheered in awe! As we looked at each other in shock and tried to work out where the whale had gone, our young blubbery friend decided the show wasn’t over, breaching twice more right beside us!

Its moments like this, the exciting and unexpected, that is truly the highlight of any whale watching tour. We would love to be able to predict the nature of the whales and to be able to say when and where the action will take place, but it’s this unknowing that makes it a true rush and a bucket list moment for many of our passengers.