Wells Worthwhiles: Kaikoura

We drove to Kaikoura after the Abel Tasman for one purpose... to see whales! This is a town with nothing going on besides fishing and whale watching, and we couldn't leave NZ without seeing a whale. This is a very well organized company who takes you by boat to see the whales, typically sperm whales. There is a really cool explanation with cool images of why Kaikoura is such a whale haven, but I cannot do it justice. Basically it has a really, really deep canyon not very far from the mainland which makes deep sea water fish available for the whales. Apparently it is uncommon for deep water like this to be near the continental shelf. Awesome. The sperm whale that the company had tracked was really far off shore so it took us over 30 minutes to get to a point where they could listen for him underwater. Once they listened, we took off in its direction and found him right away! Lucky for us he had just come up from a deep dive, and we got to see him for about 7 minutes before he went on and did his next dive. I even got the tail shot as we went to dive back into the canyon for abother hour or so. Because these whales can dive for 45 minutes to almost 2 hours, they can be difficult to catch on the surface. After the awesome dive we tried to find another sperm whale but were unsuccessful. That was slightly disappointing, and we had to start heading back to dock because we had traveled so far from the coast. BUT as we were getting really close to the dock, someone spotted something really rare for this time of year... a humpback whale, and not one but TWO! Humpbacks do not usually come until July, but there were two adolescent males making the journey earlier than usual. They were playing around dangerously with some of the fishing lines. One actually came quite far out of the water and did kind of a splash dive for us. At the time I was pulling out my camera and only caught a glimpse of this, but we did get to see both whales a couple times. We were really excited to see humpbacks, and the sperm whale with it's neat tail dive would have been enough!