The blessings of our mild and beautiful autumn weather continue to flow as we have been able to keep our boats in the water and in the past few days venture outside into the Atlantic Ocean to observe various life forms returning to our waters including rafts of common eiders and white winged scoters as well as a host of gannets and other pelagic seabirds which are in the area before returning to their winter waters in the South Atlantic.
The biggest bonus of the fall season however has been getting absolutely stunning views of our Gulf of Maine humpbacks who have been seen easily within 3 miles of our coastline off of Chatham Inlet and are feeding there constantly on the massive amounts of sand eels that still bloom in our waters. We counted more than 30 different whales in the two afternoons we spent at sea. The whales are feeding cooperatively again using the "bubble-netting" technique we described in a previous blog entry (August 2013). As stated then it is still quite rare to get such large concentrations of feed at or near the surface in our waters so close to shore and seeing the humpbacks exhibiting this feeding behavior is very special.
