Pictures from Whale-watching

It was another glorious day in Okinawa today...a perfect day to grab the cameras, hop on a boat, and go out whale-watching. Appropriately, we looked like dorky tourists:
You'll never guess what we saw.

THAR SHE BLOWS! (seriously, they wanted us to say that whenever a whale spouted...um...no)...
And where there's spray, there's whales:
I could watch them all day long, I swear...
I wasn't terribly impressed with how close some of the other boats got to the whales, but it did make for quite the size comparison (if you click on this picture and look closely, you can actually see the whale's mouth on the right):
Now, I have always wanted to get a picture of a whale flipping its tail. And not from a million miles away like the ones I got at Hedo. I mean a close-up, badass, whale tail pic. Why? I don't know. I just have. It's been etched in stone on my bucket list since I was a kid.

Please excuse me while I go cross off that particular item...
Again...
And one more time for good measure:
Traffic jam!
There is only one thing cooler than getting a whale tail pic, and that's getting a whale breaching. We did see one breach today, but I was busy trying not to fall on my ass when the boat had hit some waves, and didn't quite get my camera up to my face in time. I saw the breach in all its glory and will never forget it, but sadly, this was the best I could do as far as pictures:
All splash. No whale.

But I would be remiss if I didn't have something to show my loyal blog minions, so here is an artist's rendering of what I saw:
Just not the same, is it?

My husband, fortunately, was faster on the uptake and got this amazing shot:
We're hoping to get out at least once more before the migration season is over, so in between lots of cover art and release dates in the coming weeks, hopefully I'll be posting more whale pictures. Check back and see. ;)