Kaikoura and the whale cruise

My second to last stop and my last pre-booked activity.   As I'm now nearly at the end of the trip, I was really counting on my weather curse to be broken.  I didn't have an extra day to kill waiting out another storm and I certainly no longer had the patience.  But no matter, it was a lovely day and very nice cruise.  The way the cruise works is it heads off shore to where there is a deep water channel where sperm whales tend to congregate.  The boat was equipped with sonar and had help spotting whales from overhead planes.  For every hour a whale spends deep underwater, it will spend about 10 minutes on the surface sucking up oxygen.  As soon as a whale is spotted on the surface, we were shepherded back to our seats and the boat sped over to its location.  We usually got there a few minutes before the spectaular dive and "whale tail" shot.  Once it goes under it leaves a slick spot on the surface called its footprint.  Apparently we were quite lucky today in spotting whales four times - the average is 1-2.  We also had some quality time with a few pods of dolphins, some of which were doing acrobatics.  One of the boat operators was running a 'swim with the dolphins' tour.  We also saw plenty of albatross and a few seals.  This cruise, along with the helo flight, was probably the highlight of my trip.