Thar she blows!

As we were up early, Sean and Aiden headed to the beach while I showered. Aiden and his eagle eyes spotted a dolphin out in the bay. He came back to camp very excited to share his news. Off to Dunsborough this morning for our next day of adventures. First stop was the info place, then picked up groceries and headed to a pottery place. Beautiful pottery – wish I had a bigger suitcase ;-) Had lunch at a playground/picnic area along the beach before heading to the place where the Whale Watching boat was mooored.

It wasn't long after heading out that we spotted a mother humpback whale and her young calf. The whales at this time of year are heading north with their young after spending the winter in the Southern Ocean. We didn't stay very long around the mother and calf but continued up along the coast and spotted a  couple of juveniles that played a little shy so we continued on again.

Humpback whales in general are curious animals. At any rate we had some very memorable encounters with these large playful intelligent creatures. There was a presentation put together by the Sea Shepard group (they have a ship and follow whaling fleets to try to stop illegal whaling) on the way back that is still resonating with us.

They said we spend very large amounts of money to search for intelligent life outside our planet yet we haven't even tried to communicate with the other forms of intelligent life on this planet. There have been some break throughs on the communications front with whales recently with computer analysis of whale song demonstrating the complex structure and repeating patterns, not to mention some of the cultural and regional variations discovered a few years ago. The other interesting perspective presented is that there are so many wars over resources but so few people fighting for the most precious resource on the planet: life.

Riding the high of whale interaction we decided to set up camp, grab some supper, and dream of whales. The weather is unseasonable chilly for this time of year (lows in single digits with highs in the mid teens), cool and windy with showers. We have been lucky that the showers have cooperated with us and not put a damper on anything we've tried to do so far.