Orca spouts spotted
Fisherman Clay Ching and his two daughters were fishing some 13 miles off of Kaunakakai, which is on the Hawaiian island of Molokai, when they spotted the orcas, also known as killer whales. At first all Ching spotted was something unusual — water spraying into the air.
He then spotted a spout.
It was water from the spout of orcas, first one, then another (a third orca, a calf, was also seen). Ching told Khon2 News in Hawaii that he immediately alerted his girls and they had a wonderful view together of ocras, who were likely from a transient pod passing through.
“So I said, ‘Hey you guys, try watch in front. Oh there it is! There’s two spouts!'” he told Khon. “They actually came to the boat like as you see in the underwater stuff.
“They were directly underneath us for a while then they came up again,” he added. “When they came up again maybe they were 10-15 ft from the boat.”
Dreaming of whales
Ching has been fishing the waters for about 50 years and said he had never seen orcas in Hawaiian waters previously. He was particularly glad his two girls were along when he finally did.
Humpback whales are a common sight around the islands but killer whale pods are not common. David Schofield of the NOAA said that a year or more can go by without any sightings of orcas.
“We don’t believe we have any resident killer whales or orcas here in Hawaii,” he told Khon. “They’re usually just kind of cruising through at different times of the year.”
Ching, who operates a fishing tour company called Hallelujah Hou Fishing, said the experience was made even more special due to the fact that the night before one of his daughters had dreamed of seeing orcas. And that’s where the power of dreams comes in to the story.
For Dad, seeing an orca in Hawaiian waters took five decades of work fishing the area while for his daughter it took just one night of dreaming about it.
