Bermudian Sherry Bailey had been wanting to see a whale her whole life. This week she got her wish, thanks to a special whale watching boat trip offered by the Bermuda Underwater Exploration Institute (BUEI).

When the BUEI?s boat left the dock on Tuesday morning Mrs. Bailey posed with the day?s carrying photographer Chris Burville?s photographs of a baby whale calf breaching off the South Shore.

?This is what I am going to see,? Mrs. Bailey said pointing at the newspaper.

One of the most amazing things is that the whales aren?t that far off shore. On this trip, humpback whales were spotted only an hour or so into the journey, and well within sight of land. When the first spout was spotted most of the passengers managed to scramble up a ladder to the top deck to take a look.

?It?s a mystery why they stop in Bermuda in the spring,? said tour guide and BUEI volunteer Judie Clee. ?When they come down from the north in autumn, they don?t stop in Bermuda, they take another route. They mate and give birth to calves in the Caribbean. Their behaviour down there is quite different than it is up here. Often times down there the males will fight quite violently, and so many will arrive here with healing wounds. They might stop in Bermuda waters in the spring because the water around here is warmer for their babies.?

The waters in the Caribbean are actually quite barren in terms of whale food. They don?t actually eat much until they come north to Bermuda.

?This is their first feeding stop on the way back from the south,? said Mrs. Clee. ?We have deep sea squid here, which they love to eat. Another reason they might stop here is that there are no orcas (killer whales) in our waters so the baby is protected.?

As Captain Mike Hayward pulled around to take a better look at a pod of three or four whales off the starboard bow, the boat began to lurch quite hard. One participant fell, almost knocking someone else?s camera over the side. Over another hard wave a whale watcher tumbled onto the reporter. On previous whale trips, many whale watchers had been quite sea sick. This time however, everyone was leaning over the side, only to get a better look at the whales.

They are called humpback because of the arch their bodies make as they dive. The undersides of their flippers are very white. When they swim just below the surface it is the white patches that can be tracked with the human eye. On this day, one whale had a dorsal fin with a white tip, which was, apparently, unusual.

?When you see their flukes come up like that it means they have gone down for a dive and you probably won?t see them again for a few minutes,? said Mr. Hayward.

As the group waited, five minutes turned into about 15. People started to chat, and pulled out their lunch. ?There must be something very tasty down there,? Mrs. Clee said.

Sure enough, the whales appeared again, never more than three at once. A whale came to the surface and began to beat the water with its fin. At one point two of them rolled onto their backs and all flippers and fins were visible.

?Look they are waving,? said eight-year-old Anna Cutler. She waved back, revelling in a small moment of interspecies communication.

Mrs. Clee said no one is sure why whales do this, but it may be a way to cool off in warmer waters, or it may also simply be a play behaviour.

This was Mrs. Clee?s first trip as a whale watch guide for the BUEI. She is an enthusiastic scuba diver, and is well known for her marine volunteer work.

?I love volunteering,? said Mrs. Clee. ?I love reading about the oceans, learning about them and teaching other people about them.?

She said there is now so much information about the marine world available for the non-scientist.

?You don?t have to be a scientist now to get involved,? she said.

As she spoke, there was a cry from the other end of the boat, as a whale jumped from the water not far off. Unfortunately, 90 percent of people on the boat were looking in the opposite direction. That?s one of the down points of whale watching, there are no guarantees. When the whales go down, nobody knows where they will come up again. We were lucky on this tour, but it is possible to go on a whale watch cruise and not see any whales, or just see one or two, or just see dolphins, which are also considered whales (at least by people who run commercial whale watching tours). There are specific names for whale activities. When whales lay around on top of the water, it is called logging. They may look like they are sleeping, but actually, they are just resting. They don?t sleep, because they are voluntary breathers.

When their flukes come up, they are diving. When they jump out of the water in a sudden dramatic display it is called breaching. On this day the group was lucky enough to see whales breaching far off on the horizon, towards the end of the trip. The group saw three complete breaches in succession.

?In all my years out here, I have only seen breaching once,? said Mr. Hayward. ?They don?t breach very often because it takes a tremendous amount of energy for them to do that. One jump like that uses up about one percent of what they have eaten that day.?

When they are feeding, they send out a mass of bubbles that form a kind of net, trapping fish inside. Then the whale simply opens its mouth and sucks in the little fish and shrimp known as krill. Usually, the whales stay beyond the reef line, but sometimes there are some close calls. Last year Chris Flook of the Bermuda Aquarium, Museum & Zoo found a baby whale trapped in a fishing net inside the reef line. He jumped into the water and cut the baby whale free, then guided it out through the reefs into the open ocean. Just outside the reef line, the mother whale was waiting for her baby.

?That was a very lucky escape for that baby whale,? said Mrs. Clee. A baby whale may weigh around 3,000 pounds but eventually grow to weigh 40 tonnes. It gains about 100 pounds per day, and takes five years to mature. Females are usually bigger than males. Another interesting thing about whale anatomy is that because they have separate air and food passages, whale babies don?t have to be burped.

As the boat turned around and headed for home again in the afternoon, Mrs. Bailey said she was very happy with her experience. ?I don?t have to imagine these anymore,? she said. ?Now I know what they do all day, fish and swim around and dive.?

Libby Durrant said she has lived in Bermuda for 33 years and never seen a whale before.

?I have trolled up and down the South Shore a hundred times,? she said. ?I scuba dive and I have a boat, but I have never seen a whale before.?

?To tell you the truth,? said Anna Cutler, eight, a student at the Bermuda High School for Girls, ?I am not looking forward to going back to land.?

Marnie McAllister, a friend of Judie Clee, said she loved the whales, and she?d had the pleasure of swimming with them in the Caribbean. ?They are just gentle giants,? she said. ?They are so wonderful. I had the pleasure of swimming with a mother and calf. As she swam past me she made direct eye contact with me. That was a moment you never forget.?

The BUEI plans to continue whale watching trips a couple of times a week for the month of April, as long as the whales hang about. However, Mr. Hayward didn?t think that they would stay around Bermuda much longer.