Day 8 - Whales

Was up at the crazy hour of 6am this morning. This was due to the room being very bright and full of morning sunshine. Although this was not something that I was complaining about as I like being up early when we are away as there is so much to see and do. Erika woke up shortly after and we set about having an early breakfast on the rooftop balcony and getting packed and ready to leave for Hermanus.

Rooftop view at Plettenberg bay

The journey again was very easy with hardly any traffic on the roads. We took a couple of roadside stops along the way and completed our journey in just under 6 hours. A quick trip the the Hermanus tourist information centre found us a hotel to stop in with a sea facing room for 550 rand a night.

Another great road

A quick offload of the car contents into our hotel room and we were off the few kilometres into the main town to spot some whales. Luckily, Nato the hotel guy told us that there where still plenty of whales about here and that we would also be able to see them from our hotel room at times. Almost immediately after parking up we saw our first whale very close to shore. We then saw our first breaching whale. Breaching is where they shoot out of the water head first and then splash down into the water. They can come out of the water anything up to 2 thirds of their body length. This one was quite far away from the shore but it breached a number of times and we got some photos and pleased us immensely.

Our first whale breaching sighting.

We then watched some more whales nearer to shore for an hour or so but then a heavy rain shower came forcing us to retreat. We didn't go far though as we found a restaurant along the seafront and we sat at an upstairs window and from here we could still watch the whales. Whilst we were there, we were treated to the sight of about 5 whales swimming very close to shore and 2 distant whales multiple breaching - A truly spectacular meal. After the meal we went back to the waters edge on some rocks and watched the mother and baby duo's swimming close by the shore.

Managed to capture the head and tale of this whale.

Exhaling through its blowhole.

Another breaching southern right whale.

There are 3 whales in this picture.

Mother and albino calf.

The whales came very close to the rocks.

A rock Hyrax (known as a Dassie in South Africa)

Sunset over Hermanus.

Tomorrow we plan to have another day of whale watching from land and hopefully the weather will improve allowing us to go on a noon boat trip that we have booked to get an even closer view of the whales.