Warm Jan. brings whales closer to Va. Beach shore

VIRGINIA BEACH

Just off the sand of the resort strip, dark giants cruise the waters in unheard-of numbers.

They’re here because of the weather. An unusually mild winter has led to warmer-than-normal water temperatures, which prompted the bait fish to stick around, which attracted our bus-sized visitors – the humpback whales.

We’ve seen them before. Just not so many.

“This season is epic,” said Jeff Parks, who captains a whale watching tour out of Rudee Inlet. “I’ve been doing this for 30 years and I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Once hit-or-miss, the tours, led each winter by the Virginia Aquarium & Marine Science Center, are finding whales at every outing.

“We’ve seen them in 8 feet of water right next to the beach,” said Mark Jennings, an aquarium tour guide. “There’s so much whale noise out here that a sub coming in the other day had to stop and listen to try to sort it all out.”

The Navy doesn’t comment on submarine operations, but over the weekend, humpbacks were leaping like dolphins in and around the heavily travelled shipping lanes. More than 30 individual whales have been identified in the area this year. A typical winter brings five or six.

On Sunday, humpbacks were threading between fishing boats trolling for rockfish near the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. On Parks’ boat, jaws dropped as dorsal fins broke the surface and water streamed off massive, rolling backs.

“This is amazing,” gasped Carmel Saucer, who was on board with her husband, Ken, and 13-year-old son, Austin. “We’ve lived here for 20 years and this is the first time we’ve done this. Why is it that you never go see the things close to home that other people come so far to see?”

The whales have come a long way themselves. They’re North Atlantic humpbacks, a population of about 800 animals that migrates between Greenland and the Caribbean islands. Summers are spent feeding in polar waters; winters are spent mating and calving in the tropics.

Whales too young or too old for those pursuits have no reason to travel that far south. According to Parks, 1997 was the first year they showed up in any numbers off Virginia Beach. No one knows what drew them in.

“There’s so much we don’t know about them,” said Alex Hill, a project supervisor with the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society. Down from headquarters in Plymouth, Mass., Hill was offering Parks and the aquarium advice on how to observe the whales without causing them too much stress.

Never approach head-on or box them in, and don’t follow for too long.

Fortunately, humpbacks can take a bit of interaction. They’re among the most curious of their kind, known to surface beside boats and roll on their side for a better look. Largely solitary, they do band together for short periods, often cooperating in the hunt for food.

Humpbacks – named for the way they bend in a dive – work in concert to corral and disorient schools of fish, forming nets with streams of air bubbles. Then they attack from below, lunging upward with mouths wide, a gulp that takes in as much as 2 tons of water. They use their tongue to squeeze the water through rows of baleen in their jaws, which strain out their meal, much like a colander.

Parks has gotten to know humpbacks better than ever this season. On one tour, a whale came so close to his boat, the spray from its blowhole doused him and several passengers.

And while the experience was quite unique, “That was one rotten smell,” he said. “Not fishy, but like something dead. Whales have really bad breath.”

Joanne Kimberlin, 757-446-2338, joanne.kimberlin@pilotonline.com