ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, March 9, 1997 TAG: 9703100065
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-16 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: VIRGINIA BEACH
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
It's been a whale of a winter off the Virginia Beach coast, with young humpback and fin whales returning to delight tourists and locals with their acrobatic antics.
Whale sightings were sporadic during last year's cold winter. The bay anchovies and small fish the whales eat moved to warmer waters away from the coast, and the whales followed, said Alice Scanlan, spokeswoman for the Virginia Marine Science Museum.
But with this year's warmer winter, the fish stayed close to home; whales have been spotted on half of the whale-watching boat trips run by the museum, Scanlan said Friday.
``It definitely is considered to be a good year,'' Scanlan said, adding that as many as six whales have been seen on a single trip.
From Jan. 11 through Wednesday, the museum took 9,800 people on 148 boat excursions. The trip season was extended two weeks to March 16.
The best year for whale sightings was 1995, with whales being seen on 90 percent of the trips. In that year, more than 23,000 people signed up for trips to watch whales surface and spew the Atlantic water into the air.
Not only are there more whales this year than last, but the whales are different.
``Normally, we've been looking for juvenile humpback whales,'' Scanlan said. ``This year, while we did have a few sightings of humpback whales, we mainly saw fin whales, the largest whales species second only to the blue whale.''
Researchers don't know why there were more fin whales this year, whether the same whales return each year, or how many whales there are, Scanlan said.
Juvenile humpbacks, younger than 5, were first spotted close to Virginia Beach in 1991.
Sexually mature humpbacks migrate between feeding grounds off the New England coast in summer and breeding grounds in the Caribbean in winter, while juveniles stop in the food-rich Chesapeake Bay.
The fin whales also are migrating through the area. The young fin whales range from 40 to 65 feet in length; the young humpback whales are 35 feet long. Both species are endangered.
The whale-watching trips boost tourism, normally sluggish in the winter, said Ron Kuhlman, the city's director of marketing and sales for convention and visitor development.
``The importance of being able to offer a winter activity in a beach resort can't be overstated,'' Kuhlman said, noting that 60 to 65 percent of the city's hotel rooms usually are empty during the off-season, despite cheaper rates.
``You're never going to fill up 10,000 hotel rooms with whale watchers, but every couple of hundred rooms helps,'' he said.
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