Killer whales again
By Lloyd Edwards
Wednesday, 5th December 2018Lloyd's first St Croix tour on "My China"
It was quite an emotional day for me. After taking years to save and finally build and launch our new 35 foot Buttcat, the great day had arrived. We only had two paying guests so I invited as many friends as possible. We left the port in perfect weather not knowing what Algoa Bay had in store for us . . . little did we know!
First up was the biggest bait ball I had seen for ages. There were as many as five going off all around us at once! There were at least 1500 Long-beaked common dolphins, thousands of Cape gannets and at least 10 Bryde's whales and a Minke whale. As soon as the dollies managed to surround a school of sardines, the gannets came raining down, followed by the lunge feeding of Bryde's and Minke whales.
We eventually dragged ourselves away from the action and headed for St Croix Island. On the eastern side at Lloyd's Bay we found a school of 300 nervous looking Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins. I say nervous, because they were swimming so close together and right up against the bricks (rocks). We didn't have to wait long to find an explanation to this behaviour.
After receiving a tip off, we raced south from St Croix and found a truly massive and magnificent adult male killer whale. Males have been recorded at almost 9 metres in length and weighing 9 tons. This one must have been close. The maximum length for a male killer whales dorsal fin was found to be 1,78 metres and this one was around that length. This is the second day in a row that killer whales have been sighted in Algoa Bay which must be a record! As per our last posting, the previous day, a family of six killer whales were spotted in the same location.
