August 6, 2024 — As the 100-foot long whale watch vessel, “Acadia Explorer,” idles at the dock in Bar Harbor on this day in late July, passenger Sarah Leiter with the Maine Department of Marine Resources opens her laptop.
“This is the game plan for the next two days,” she said, pointing to a map of the Gulf of Maine marked with a series of red dots arranged in a grid-like pattern.
They show the locations of 26 passive acoustic monitors listening for North Atlantic right whales about 30 feet underwater.
On this trip, Leiter’s team will swap out some of the units that need new batteries — and will conduct visual surveillance for whales. They’ll travel at 10 knots along a predetermined path that zigs and zags in and offshore, stopping first at a point just southwest of Swan’s Island.
“Then along the coastline off of MDI, past Mount Desert Rock over to site 6, and then we kind of create the same pattern following a U, until we get to the last visual waypoint, and then we end up back in Bar Harbor,” Leiter said.
Along the way, the crew scans the water almost constantly, looking for signs of marine life.
So far this year they’ve seen humpback, fin and minke whales. But no right whales.
“All data is equally useful data, so those zeros are just as important as finding a pile of right whales,” said Erin Summers, who leads the new marine mammal research division for the Department of Marine Resources.