Most people picture a whale watch as a morning on the water — binoculars, humpbacks, maybe a breach if you’re lucky. And they’re right. But what happens to this boat, this crew, and this mission when the whales are gone?
Every summer, while Maui’s humpbacks are feeding up north, we’re still out here — we’ve just gone underwater.
The reef at stake
Coral reefs cover less than one percent of the ocean floor, but they support about a quarter of all marine life. Maui’s reefs are feeding grounds, nurseries, and shoreline protection all at once — and they’re under pressure from warming water, runoff, and physical damage. And if you want to protect something, first you have to be able to measure it. Reef monitoring is how scientists take a reef’s pulse, year after year, so they can catch change before it becomes a crisis.
How the science works
Before joining the team at Ultimate, our Director of Marine Research spent over a decade working as a researcher at Scripps Institution of Oceanography with the team that pioneered the reef survey methods used to monitor Maui’s reefs today. The method is photogrammetry: we take thousands of overlapping photographs of the reef from multiple angles, and specialized software stitches them into a precise three-dimensional model. That model lets scientists measure coral colony size, structural complexity, and the ratio of living tissue to bare rock — then return the following year and compare the same reef, down to the centimeter. Scripps introduced this method to Maui to bring new precision to the coral monitoring that NOAA and the Hawaiʻi Division of Aquatic Resources (DAR) have run here for decades.
Our role: field support for the science
For this work, Ultimate Whale Watch serves as a field support vessel. It began when the Scripps team chartered our boats to reach survey sites that can only be accessed by water. Over time the relationship deepened: their researchers trained our crew in photogrammetry field methods, and we’ve kept those skills active on the water ever since. As field capacity gets harder to maintain across the research community, our boats and trained crew help carry that survey effort forward — using methods we learned directly from the scientists who built this program.
Why it matters now
This year, that monitoring record matters more than usual. A strong El Niño is building — NOAA gives it better-than-90% odds of intensifying through fall and winter — and the agency’s latest outlook already flags elevated heat-stress risk for Hawaiʻi’s reefs. When water stays too warm for too long, corals expel the algae that feed and color them, and turn stark white. That’s bleaching, and if the heat lingers, many corals don’t recover.
Years of documented reef conditions — coral cover, structure, species — are what let scientists measure the scale of any damage with precision, and steer recovery to where it’s needed most. That’s what a long-term monitoring program makes possible, and it’s why we think supporting this work is part of what it means to be an ocean company.
Whale season will come back around, but the work we do in the water between seasons is part of the same mission — understanding this ocean, paying attention to it, and giving the scientists who study it the access they need to do their jobs.
Coming up: Maui’s reefs have faced heat before — the bleaching events of 2015 and 2019. In a follow-up, we’ll look at what scientists learned tracking these reefs through those events, and what it could mean for this year.
Get involved
Come snorkel with us — we run tours all summer, not just whale season. Book a Maui snorkel tour →
Follow the science on our YouTube channel.
Researchers & partners: if you need a field platform in Maui Nui, learn about partnering with us → or email research@ultimatewhalewatch.com.
With gratitude to our research partners — the Smith Lab at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, NOAA, and the Hawai’i Division of Aquatic Resources (DAR) — whose long-term monitoring makes this work possible.