Humpback Whale Breach at Sunset

I LOVE YOU MIKEY! That was the echo over the ocean one beautiful evening in Trinity Bay, Newfoundland. I was in Trinity for a boat tour with Kris (Sea of Whales) with the hope of photographing a breaching humpback whale.  Over the past number of years, I have captured some breaching whales from afar but the pictures had to be cropped. This tour was like most of my Zodiac adventures, with great whale tail shots and a lovely evening on the water.  Kris, the operator of the Zodiac always names whales after the guests on the tour.  At one point, he was going to call a whale Mike but I told him not to because I would rather save that name for the one that breaches - even though I know that it’s not very common to see a breaching whale. 

I have always heard the story about "one whale jumped for 5 minutes straight" but it was something I had yet to witness.  I thought that having spent so much time on the ocean I had to strike it lucky one day. With only 15 minutes left on the tour, I figured it was another write-off for my chance to photograph breaching whales.  Then captain Kris decided to see if a different side of the bay would have whales with a little more action.
Then, in the distance, I could see white water!  As we got closer myself and 10 other tourists were silent with anticipation of a breach.  I saw the whale go down so I moved to the other side off the boat, expecting him to come up on the that side.  Then, I heard ooh and aww from the tourists which turned out to be the breaching whale on the same side where I had been.  Yes, I was pretty down at this point, wondering if that had been my only chance to photograph the breach.

As I scanned the water, waiting for the elusive whale I saw this massive 20-ton creature begin to rise from the ocean! With the first instinct of just trying to witness it I remembered that I had to take a picture of this quickly moving scene! As fast as I could, I locked my camera on the whale and then I just held the shutter button down (click, click, click)!

At this point, everyone on board was screaming with excitement and I believe the whale (Mikey) heard us because he decided to jump again. The more noise and laughter we made the higher he wanted to jump! Everyone was screaming, “do it again Mikey, do it again!”  At the end of the show, the screams were, "I love you Mikey!” The excitement in the air from all of us was just electrifying.  There were a lot of ooh's and ahh’s that evening and it was something that we will never forget. For the cherry on top, I got that razor-sharp image with no crop required.  :)