HAL whalewatching Dominican Republik

[Dennis75]

On our cruise with the Noordam in januari 2012 we booked the whalewatching tour in Samana. Can anyone tell anything about there experience with this excursion?

[RetiredMustang]

Dennis75,

 

Welcome to Cruise Critic!

 

We were in Samana in Feb. 2010 on board Noordam. Here is what I wrote in a blog I did at the time.

 

Dave

 

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Tues., Feb. 16, Samana DR

　

We pulled into the bay of Samana a bit early, and tenders ashore started shortly after 9 a.m. There were fine houes and resorts along the shore as we arrived. The hills were mostly covered with coconut palms and scrub forest, and rocky outcrops and small sandy beaches were along the shoreline. Quite pretty.

　

We met in the Queen's lounge at 10:20 for our whale watching excursion. We took a tender about 20 minutes to the port. We did not see much outside the port area itself, but Mark Pells had told us it was rustic, and the people were mostly poor. It was rustic, but not run-down. One thing was that the pier was narrow and it did not have any guardrails; I kept expecting someone not sure of his/her footing to take a flop into the water, but it never happened.

　

We gathered in a gaggle, and then we split between two boats for the excursion. DW and I boarded the smaller of the two boats -- a fast catamaran-hulled boat that traveled 20 minutes or so back past Noordam and back along our morning's track to the open bay off Samana to look for whales. On the way, we passed a Regent ship anchored near an island; our guide said the island was a five-star resort, and we surmised that Regent had booked it for their passengers that day.

　

We arrived at a spot where the guide obviously thought we would see whales, and kind of puttered about for a while. The guide said the Bay of Samana was the winter breeding and calving area for humpback whales, from January to March. We had started to think we might be out of luck after we hadn't seen anything for about 15 minutes, and suddenly we were in the middle of a half-dozen pods of humpbacks surfacing all around us!

　

We latched on to a pair, a male and a female (Taking into account what the guide had said, apparently this was the humpback singles bar area), and followed them for about an hour and they put on a show for us -- they didn't leap out of the water like in the insurance ads, but they were active, surfacing, rolling, blowing, flipping their flukes, etc. They finally dived and we wandered around a bit and then found a pod of three (a female and two males) and followed them for about a half an hour. The guide says they sing to each other -- no doubt, variations on "What's your sign, babe? Do you come here often?"

　

It was a blast, and very cool to see them up so close -- at one time, one of them went under our boat, and we could see the whole thing as it glided by, only a foot or two under the hull. I know that Cruisinetta had posted that in her whale watching tour earlier this year only the people at the front could see anything, but we had a long time and the boat captain maneuvered the boat so that everyone got plenty of opportunity to see the whales. We may have had unusually good fortune in seeing so many whales for such a long time, but we were delighted that we had decided to take the tour.

　　

We returned to port, stopping a couple of times. Once, our guide pointed out a sport where a scene from one of the sequels to"Pirates of the Caribbean" had been filmed, including Johnny Depp. At the other spot, we viewed the beach where our guide said Columbus landed and asked the Taino indians for gold, but all they had to trade was fruit.

[Dennis75]

Retired Mustang, thanks