We finished our third survey today and it was another great one! We started off the survey on the eastern side of Jeffreys Ledge to see what is out there, since we hadn't been there yet this year. Unfortunately, there wasn't much out there to see. It was a very quiet area with very few birds, a handful of harbor porpoise, and only one or two humpbacks in the distance. We did how ever get to help deploy a pop-up buoy for Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary.

These pop-up buoys are acoustical recorders that sit on the bottom of the ocean recording every noise in the area such as whales, fish, and boats. When the researchers want to recover the buoys to be able to hear what they have recorded, they can use a remote signal to cause the buoys to float up to the surface. These passive acoustical buoys are very helpful to monitor areas when survey boats or plans are not able to be out there. To learn more about the pop-up buoys, and other acoustical buoys, you can visit Cornell University's website.

When we got over to the western side of the ledge we found whales once again! The weather was a little rough today with whitecaps and 3-4 foot seas, but the right whales were still there. We found a mom and calf first. The mom is a whale known as Pediddle (a nickname for a car with one headlight out) and this is her seventh calf!! We then moved on to find two humpbacks and two fin whales, but just beyond them were a ton of V-shaped blows, the distinctive shape of right whale blows. Due to the weather and the quickly setting sun, we were not able to get photo-ids of all of the whales out there. However we were able to get enough Id's to see that some of the whales from yesterday were still around and some new whales had moved into the area. Most of the whales were spending 10-15 minutes diving (the water was about 500ft deep) and there were no SAGs today.

We took some plankton tows today and it looks like there might be a good deal of food in the area, so hopefully these whales will stay around for a little while longer. Check back next week to see how our fourth survey goes!