Took my dad out on my boat for father's day for some fishing. We left out of Cape May (New Jersey) and hit the Five Fathom Bank (about 12-15 miles offshore) for some trolling for bluefish. For about an hour, we had 3 finback whales swimming along side the boat. They looked to be about 70-80 feet long. At one point they were about 30 yards away. Talk about being nervous. This was one of the coolest experiences I've had. After an hour of not catching any fish, we decided to say goodbye to the whales and head a mile or two away from them to set up chumming.

That is really cool, never seen whales, well did you end up catching anything??

I drive a charter boat in southeast alaska and i had a huge humpback whale jump clear out of the water about 100 feet in from on my boat while i was doing 25 knots. By the time i turned and stopped i was about 10 feet from the whale. Was a huge pod of them. When it surfaced it sprayed all the clients on the boat. Was a pretty cool thing to see. We usually see about 10 or 12 whales per day. Mostly humpback and a few Orcas now and then


Kev

Yes. We got into some nice sharks while we were chumming. Got one in the boat, one to the boat and lost about seven of them. We were using 40lb PowerPro line on Penn 320s and 4/0s. The bigger sharks (>6 feet) would fight us for about 20 minutes or so and then the line would break. I think their abbraisive skin wore through the line - especially from their tails when they would run. We needed longer leaders. After losing most of our hooks and wire, we fished the artificial reef nearby and caught sea bass, flounder, tautog and sea robin. We kept 3 big sea bass for dinner.