A 50-foot humpback whale that was seen splashing around Monday is big news in the nation’s smallest state.
North Kingstown, Rhode Island, harbormaster Ed Hughes said he heard a colossal splash in Narragansett Bay — the diminutive state’s proportionally massive body of water — when he was making his rounds Monday morning.
Hughes said the conditions on the water were “cold, windy and miserable” for the first time in weeks, so his initial thought was that he had heard an accident.
“I thought it was a boat and thought, ‘oh, great’.” But when he looked, he said he couldn’t believe what he saw. “You got to be kidding me!” he said he thought to himself.
Narragansett Bay stretches about 25 miles from the Atlantic Ocean north toward Providence, the capital city. Hughes said the whale was about halfway up when he saw it splashing around for about 45 minutes.
“Truly amazing,” he said. “What a way to end the year!”
Humpback whale sightings are so rare in the region this time of year that Cory Blount, the manager of a local whale watching company, operates his tour business only during the summer.
Even then, Blount said, humpbacks are typically 15-25 miles off shore.
“It’s very surprising,” he said.
Surprising, perhaps, because humpbacks aren’t supposed to be lingering around. Like many New Englanders, the humpback heads for warmer climes once the mercury begins to drop every year.
“In the winter, (humpback whales) migrate to calving grounds in subtropical or tropical waters, such as the Dominican Republic in the Atlantic and the Hawaiian Islands in the Pacific,” the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says on its website.
While Rhode Island has probably never been confused with being a Hawaiian island, the Providence Journal reported that December 2015 is on track to be the warmest December on record, something Rhode Island state climatologist Lenny Giuliano attributed to El Niño.
“It must have followed a school of fish into the bay,” Giuliano said of the wayward whale.