This skipper is anticipating plenty of whales and iceberg sightings going into tourism season
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Tour boat season is getting ready to set sail in Newfoundland and Labrador, and one skipper is anticipating a good season for icebergs and whale watching.
Skipper Bob Bartlett, who is with Trinity Bay-based Trinity Eco-Tours, said it’s looking like a promising season, adding he’s optimistic wind and tide conditions will also help.
“Whales and icebergs are the unicorn, or the preferred thing, to customers,” he told CBC Radio’s The St. John’s Morning Show.
He added Bonavista Bay is usually fortunate in that it gets one or two icebergs that stick around.
“There’s an iceberg off Bonavista,” Bartlett said. “The ice report is full of icebergs coming down.”
Pradeep Bobby, who leads research and technology company C-CORE’s Earth observation team, also said this iceberg season is looking to be a bountiful one. He says a good indicator of the iceberg season is the presence of sea ice because it protects icebergs from deteriorating.
“This year there is lots of sea ice along the coast of Labrador, even into Newfoundland waters,” he told CBC News.
He said C-CORE uses satellite images from the Canadian and European Space Agency to observe ice and they can see ice all the way from the Arctic, the coast of Labrador and off Newfoundland.
“When it comes to where the icebergs will actually go, that depends on the winds and the current patterns,” said Bobby.
“Right now, I think the currents have been pushing things a little bit further offshore. The iceberg season has been delayed as well. Back about a month and a half ago, we were looking and the closest icebergs were in northern Labrador. So they’re usually further south than that.”
As a result, Bobby said icebergs have been later in arriving off N.L.’s shores than in previous years.
‘Showmen of the ocean’
Bartlett has also been posting images of whales he’s seeing off Newfoundland to social media.
“It seems to me that every year we have a contingent of whales that comes in, which seems to be early. And I think these are probably whales that are transitioning to areas further north,” he said.
Bartlett said Newfoundland waters see “stragglers and drifters and overwinters” from whale groups that stay in the North Atlantic.
Bartlett says humpback whales, spotted here near St. Vincent’s Beach, are the ‘showmen of the ocean.’ (Mark Quinn/CBC)
He said it seems like every year starting in March he sees whales and dolphins, and he’s now seeing minke and humpback whales.
“Humpbacks are the whales that everybody likes to see. I call them the showmen of the ocean. They’re the ones that do the full body breaches out of the water,” said Bartlett.
He recalled two years ago when two endangered blue whales were spotted in Bonavista Bay, which he filmed, adding it was the first time he’d seen them alive in person and one was a calf.
“It was a good thing to see,” he said, calling it a “flourishing family.”
That was in contrast to an incident in 2014, he said, when a group of blue whales were found dead, trapped in ice.
At the time, the federal Department of Fisheries said the deaths were a “natural event.”
Bartlett also pointed to the provincial government-sponsored website Hello Humpback, where users upload their whale-watching photos in order to help track humpback whales off the coast of Newfoundland.
He said when he’s out on the water he takes footage of whales and uploads the images to the website and gets details about the individual whale, like where it’s been previously sighted.
“The other day the whale that we identified was actually a Turks and Caicos whale,” said Bartlett.
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