Whale Watching at Gloucester MA USA

Dawn at Wood Island Harbour

Our night move onto a mooring buoy meant that we slept much better for the last couple of hours of the night but it was still an early start for us from Wood Island Harbour on Thursday 27 September, especially as we knew that the wind had already gone round to the northeast and would help us on our way.

Departing Wood Island Harbour

We had the anchor up at 0655hrs and motored out of the harbour, via a rocky inshore route [Ed: to shave minutes off our passage time!], whilst we got BV ready to sail.

The previous couple of days’ passages meant that today we would try to get on as far as Gloucester.  It’s a distance of around 60 miles which was a reasonable way to go before sunset given that, though we would have a full period of ebbing tide with us, we would also have most of a period of flood against. It all depended upon our speed and we found that with the genoa poled out we made 5½-6 knots which was plenty.  We might have gone faster with the MPS hoisted but there were still quite a lot of bouncy waves around and we worried that the MPS would just keep collapsing with only 10-12 knots of wind.  Around lunchtime we passed the Isle of Shoals, off Portsmouth, which had been our back up destination if we didn’t thing we could make Gloucester by nightfall.

I decided to have an afternoon nap and Nicky kept BV going in the right direction with the distance to go to our waypoint slowly ticking down.  As we got abeam Cape Ann, about 12nm to the east of Gloucester, Nicky called out that she had seen a whale blow.  We had a little time in hand to do some unexpected whale watching and so rolled away the genoa rapidly.  It was a good call and almost immediately we were treated to this fabulous sequence…..

Wow!  It doesn’t get much better than that, we thought, except, perhaps, seeing a whale breach.

But it did.  As we watched we realised that there were several whales surfacing, indeed, several groups of several whales surfacing.

Each group would stay up for a few minutes and then disappear for a short while and, of course, we had no idea if once a group dived whether or not those whales would return to the surface close to us or further along the coast.  With the groups fairly well spaced out we had our work cut out watching for the blows to spot the next group surfacing.  We didn’t switch our engine on, and with only the mainsail up so that we didn’t go too fast or have an additional sail to handle we couldn’t really get from one group to the next between their dives.  So, we jilled around in the middle of the area they seemed to be operating in and waited for them to come to us if they wanted to.

Some spectacular fluking by the humpbacks

Thacher Island off Cape Ann with the only operating twin lighthouses in America – the question is, why?

There was a bit of a gap in the display and we thought that we really ought to get going…..

….and then, suddenly one whale decided that it really did need a close up look at the strange boat floating around in their swim space.  The whale surfaced so close behind us that Nicky squeaked and wondered if the whale was going to run into us.

It peered long and hard at us but it was so close I couldn’t get a decent photo with the telephoto ‘paparazzi’ lens I had on the camera!  However, we knew it was jolly close because the eye looked big and we could clearly see the white of its pectoral fins in the water.

Then another one surfaced next to the first …. and a second….and a third.  Shortly after we reckoned that we had 6 good-sized humpbacks gently swimming alongside us, apparently totally unconcerned about our presence.

And then, one by one, they dived away.  Clearly, it was time for them to move on.

It was time for us to get going too. We looked at the darkening sky and realised that we needed to hightail it under engine to get into Gloucester before dark (yes, there are lobster pots in that harbour too!).

We made it in around the breakwater and up to the middle of the eastern side of the large outer harbour, where we anchored close to a mooring field, just as the sun set.  We’d had a lovely sail south and a fabulous experience with whales.  What a great welcome to Massachusetts.

Gloucester, Massachusetts, USA