We were looking forward to today and anticipating that it would be one of the highlights of this trip. We drove about half an hour south to the little community of Bay Bulls. Here in Witless Bay we climbed aboard a tour boat and headed out towards the "Witless Bay Islands Park Reserve".
This just looked like something you would only see in Newfoundland.
Our chosen tour company
Heading out of Witless Bay. The water is still fairly calm and the sky is grey. The clouds are low but at sea level it is still very clear. The guide tells us that this is a wonderful viewing day. We are all bundled up (Brrr) and the wind is starting to pick up.
Once out of the bay, the coastline becomes much more extreme. Somewhere out here we spotted our first whale. It was a minke and Lily was the first to spot it. She was promised a shot of screech, but she had to turn it down.
This picture is included here because we learned something new. If you are close enough, you can see a whale as it cruises below the surface and before it rises. It must be some kind of optical illusion, but the whale appears as a turquoise blur.
After the Minke we found two (or maybe three) humpbacks. The first was a baby.
Soon a larger mother humpback appeared beside the ship. The baby with her might have been the same we saw earlier.
Baby
Thar she blows. Notice the turquoise colour under the water
Soon we approached the Witless Bay Island and the air began to fill up with birds of several kinds.
These little guys are murres. They are not extremely good at flying so they seem to work harder getting started. They look very much like little penguins skipping across the surface.
The messiest spots belonged to seagulls.
These slobs apparently don't clean up after themselves.
Some individual birds flying around us and swimming around us were puffins.
The murres are not as messy as the seagulls. On the rocks they still look like little penguins.
The puffins dig holes in and around tufts of grass. Of all the birds here they seem to be the tidiest. This may be an illusion because because growing grass could easily hide a great deal. Puffins are quite small (six inches), so it is difficult to get good closeups very long lenses. Mine is only moderately long.
One of the natural predators is the black-backed seagull.
Murres (little penguins). When we turned back towards the bay we headed into the wind and into the waves. The boat was bucking wildly and it was very difficult to move around. Lily headed up to the bow and held on very tightly. As the ship bobbed and weaved her feet sometimes left the deck. This explained the signs around the bow that said "No Jumping". If you did jump into the air at precisely the wrong moment, you could land in the water.
Finally we made it safely back into the harbour. Even in this safe haven nature still holds sway.
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