> What kinds of whales are typical around NZ? Up in Puget Sound one year, we took one of those one-day whale-watching cruises. It was awesome. There were dolphins (or porpoises?) swimming, jumping, diving, and playing just in front of the boat, and, later, we got very close to a couple pods of orcas.
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> We met another group in motorized inflatable rafts. They got *really* close--we watched some of them get to touch the whales. That would enormously cool, but nerve-wracking, I think.
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> gab"Glad he was in a covered boat"by

Well, we get orca, common dolphins, and bottlenose dolphins all around the country, and they're fairly common in the Hauraki Gulf and Auckland harbour. The town of Kaikoura in the South Island is the big whale-watching place; they get sperm whales and humpback whales close to shore there, along with Hector's dolphins and dusky dolphins. It's a big feeding and mating ground for them around there. In Wellington, when it was first settled, the colonists complained to the government about how there were so many right whales partying in the harbour all night that they couldn't sleep for the noise. European settlement here started with the whaling and sealing industries and that wiped out most of them, but since whaling stopped the whales have slowly started to come back. Yay!

I've heard of Bryde's whales, right whales and humpbacks being seen around here. I've mostly seen common dolphins in Auckland harbour, but the last bunch I saw were bottlenoses, which are much bigger and darker than the common ones.

On the rarer side of things, a few years ago a blue whale and its calf were photographed from a small plane off the Bay of Islands, up north, on their way to the Antarctic. I forget exactly how long the newspaper said it was, but the people in the plane flew over to take a closer look because at first they thought it was a nuclear submarine.

And the guy I spoke to today said their biggest news was that they saw an Arnoux's Beaked Whale and it was probably going to make the international news, because nobody has seen one since 1957 or something.

Brunnen-"they're all OUT there! Right here where I live! Aaaaah! Why can't I ever SEE one?"G