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Monday 9am - 6pm Tuesday 9am - 6pm Wednesday 9am - 6pm Thursday 9am - 6pm Friday 9am - 6pm Saturday 9am - 6pm Sunday 9am - 6pm

Auckland Whale & Dolphin Safari

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Auckland Whale & Dolphin Safari

4.5-hour marine mammal eco-safari in the Hauraki Gulf Marine Park, departing from Downtown Auckland. Come and explore Auckland's Hauraki Gulf Marine Park!
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New Zealand's only eco-tourism and research-based whale-watching trip.

14/01/2025

Nothing beats sharing the magic of Tīkapa Moana with those eager to learn, connect, and engage 🙌 Last week, the team was thrilled to involve an awesome passenger in matching dorsal fin ID photos to our catalogue, helping to identify the Bryde's whale we encountered earlier on that safari. He went on to name the whale 'Sorcha', which means brightness or radiance 😍✨ Massive shoutout to Joseph for being such a pleasure onboard, we absolutely loved all your questions! 💙

09/01/2025

Surf's up! 🏄 Yesterday afternoon we were hanging out with some awesome dolfriends who were happy catching waves in formation 🌊🐬 Overall, a fantastic safari with our awesome passengers 🤙

31/12/2024

Let's recap how special 2024 was! We loved sharing the Hauraki Gulf - Tikapa Moana with over 18,000 customers, including 412 Common Dolphin encounters and so much more! Looking forward to 2025! 🥳

24/12/2024

Meri Kirihimete from all of us at Auckland Whale and Dolphin Safari! 🎄😎

As we celebrate the festive season, we want to take a moment to express our heartfelt gratitude to our amazing crew who work tirelessly to bring you unforgettable experiences out on the water 🌊 Ngā mihi nui for your dedication and passion! ✨

We hope that your festive season is filled with love, laughter, and perhaps a glimpse of our magnificent marine friends! 🐬

Wishing you all a safe and happy Christmas and New Year! 🎁🎉

21/12/2024

We had an amazing team-building day recently, which of course had to include water activities 🌊 A big thanks to our hosts Sir Peter Blake Marine Education and Recreation Centre at Long Bay, where we started with a sunrise rock-pooling session 🐚🦀 which astounded the team with the amount of incredible critters to be found 🦠👀 To think all this life is just under the water along our shorelines is mind-blowing! 😍🤯 There's always something new to see and learn!

19/12/2024

Our 11th of December safari had awesome vibes and beautiful conditions 😎 Encounters included friendly common dolphins 🐬 an epic chin-slapping Bryde's whale 🐋 and a baby hammerhead shark (doo-doo, doo-doo, doo-doo) 🦈

17/12/2024

We're still struggling to find the words to describe our maki/orca encounters from the last few weeks 😍🤯 we watched some epic feeding and socialising behaviours from a maki pod, including a calf! With maki being nationally critical in Aotearoa and incredibly inquisitive, the passengers and crew onboard were ecstatic – how lucky are we to witness these taonga ✨

15/12/2024

Today's morning safari was like no other in AWADS history! 🤩 In the 24 years that we have operated in Tīkapa Moana we have never recorded a sighting of Pilot Whales / Upokohue / Globicephala melas, and today we saw a pod of about 40 travelling, pectoral slapping, lobtailing, foraging, and spy hopping. This pod included neonates (newborns), which you can identify in one of the photos by its white stripes, called foetal folds. But it doesn't stop there, we also had an incredibly rare encounter with a Humpback Whale / Paikea / Megaptera novaeangliae, which is one of only 11 that we have seen since the year 2000 🤩 The Hauraki Gulf is truly alive with an incredible array of cetaceans, and we'd love to show them to you on one of our safaris 👋

14/12/2024

Pretty hard not to have a great day on safari when our crew are always this stoked to be sharing their love for Tikapa Moana with you! Flicking through our online reviews, you'll notice that our crews passion and excitement for conservation tends to be a highlight of the trip 🩵 they're always keen to talk about all things ocean and absolutely love hearing all your questions!

12/12/2024

We've noticed red plankton blooms popping up all over Tikapa Moana/the Hauraki Gulf over the last week. So, of course, we had to stop to take some samples to investigate 🔬 Our crew of marine scientists (with help from a plankton expert, shout out to Lily!) were able to identify these blooms as Noctiluca! Noctiluca is a type of dinoflagellate, which is one of the most commonly occurring type of bioluminescence ✨ These blooms tend to hang around until Noctiluca's food source (both phytoplankton and zooplankton) are depleted, so we'll be keeping an eye on these blooms while we're out on the water 👀

26/11/2024

The neonates are jumping for joy, and so are we 🐬🎉 not just because summer is almost here, but because we're about to have two departures per day ✌️ From 1st December, join us for a morning or afternoon departure (or both, if you're hardcore!) and explore Tīkapa Moana with Auckland Whale and Dolphin Safari 🌊 Book your trip now: https://bit.ly/4fYBj1i

24/11/2024

We had an unforgettable Saturday safari! 🐋 We were lucky enough to see a spectacular orca sighting, including a local fisherman who certainly didn't expect to be competing for fish with a pod of around 9 orcas! 🐟🎣 Among the pod, we managed to identify some individuals: ANZAC, Funky Monkey, and Pickle! 🌊💙

07/11/2024

Yesterday was a super day! 🦸🐬 While out on safari we saw a superpod made up of potentially thousands (!!) of Common Dolphins, as well as a Bryde's Whale 🐋 Such a "super" safari makes for happy customers and happy crew ✨

28/10/2024

On Sunday we saw Tīkapa Moana’s apex predator - the pelagic orca 🐋 This pod of three females were roaming in the deeper waters of the Hauraki Gulf, which is an unusual sighting for us. We rarely see orca, as they are endangered in Aotearoa New Zealand, and when we do see them, they are the coastal variety. There are estimated to be less than 200 coastal orca in NZ and they are specialised stingray hunters, also feeding on sharks and other fish 🐟 However, there are only 6 confirmed pelagic orca in NZ, all female. They hunt marine mammals, and in 2010 some were involved in an attack on pseudorca (another species of large marine mammal) and even rammed three of them into the air before consuming one of the calves (Visser et al., 2010). Using a photo we took of the dorsal fin of one of the individuals, we were able to ID her as NZOP-005 (swipe to compare our photo to the Orca Research Trust’s catalogue) 📸

10/10/2024

Yesterday we had the pleasure of spotting one of our regulars! 🐋 She was easily identifiable from the notch in the middle of her dorsal fin and its unique blunt tip. This female, 089, was first spotted in 2010, and was seen with a calf in subsequent years. However, we haven’t seen her since 2021, so it’s awesome to sight her once again and add the sighting to the catalogue 📝

08/10/2024

"No words, just tears" 😭 Happy tears of course on yesterday's safari, with bottlenose dolphins, common dolphins, a BREACHING HUMPBACK WHALE, AND ORCA! 🐳🐬 Yesterday's crew are all retiring because it doesn’t get much better than this ☝️🙏

02/10/2024

Ever seen a dolphin nostril? 👃Technically, they’re called blowholes, but, like our nostrils, they are connected directly to the dolphin’s lungs. This series of photos demonstrates the process of a dolphin taking a breath! In the first photo, you can see bubbles forming where the dolphin is beginning to expel air out of its lungs under the water. Then as its back breaks the surface and its blow hole is exposed, it can expel the rest of the air from its lungs and take a fresh breath, like in the second photo. The third photo shows the blowhole closed just before the dolphin disappears back under the water’s surface again. The common dolphin (Delphinus delphis) in these photos could hold its breath for up to 8 minutes if needed! 🌬️

29/09/2024

Time to congratulate one of our team, George, who recently passed his Skipper qualification! 🥳 George has been with us for nearly 3 years, working as a marine guide, training for his Qualified Deck Crew Certificate, progressing to Mate position and now gaining his Skipper license in order to take the helm! ⚓ George has a ton of knowledge on and passion for the Hauraki Gulf/Tīkapa Moana so join us on Safari and learn something new from George and the rest of our friendly team 👋

Address

Viaduct Harbour
Auckland
1010

Opening Hours

Monday	9am - 6pm
Tuesday	9am - 6pm
Wednesday	9am - 6pm
Thursday	9am - 6pm
Friday	9am - 6pm
Saturday	9am - 6pm
Sunday	9am - 6pm

Telephone

0508 365 744

Website

https://www.whalewatchingauckland.com/

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Videos

Fri 29th Nov 2024 Safari (2)

What's better than one orca video? Two! 🐋 🐋

Fri 29th Nov 2024 Safari

What a 'whaley' good way to start the weekend 🐳

Safari 25th Sept 2024

Now this is what we call a multi-species feeding aggregation! 🍽️ Not one, not two, but SEVEN different species feeding together here in this video from a safari last week 🤩 This aggregation includes tohorā (Bryde's whale), aihe (common dolphin), mohi (pilchard), tākapu (Australasian gannet), pakahā (fluttering shearwater), rako (Buller's shearwater), and tara (white-fronted tern). If you look closely, you can see pilchards flopping around on the back of the whale! 🐟🐋 Over 22 species of whales and dolphins and at least 70 species of seabirds can be seen in Tīkapa Moana/the Hauraki Gulf - we’d love to see you onboard soon to show you what the Gulf has got 👋

Our much loved vessel Dolphin Explorer is having some scheduled maintenance for the next few weeks. We'll all miss being on the water daily for Safari's, but look forward to springing back into it with a new lease of life.

@izabella_sk

We're always in our golden hour while out on Tīkapa Moana ✨🌊 🎥 IG: izabella_sk

26th March 2024 Afternoon Safari

One of these things is not like the other ... 😜 Tuesday's afternoon safari featuring a psudeo orca 🐬

We thought we'd share a video of Friday's Orca encounter. This really shows how tranquil the conditions and the pod were. We were all very happy and grateful to be drifting alongside them. Wait untill the end for the large Male's fin to surface. Male Orca fins are considerably larger than females, being up to 1.8m tall! 🐼🐬

AWADS Safari 080324

Here's a sight we don't see too often - thousands of common dolphins surrounding the Dolphin Explorer 🐬On Friday we had calves and juveniles swimming amongst all the adults, breaching and chin slapping in the choppy waves 🌊

Safari 22nd Feb 2024

The Hauraki Gulf is buzzing with life! 🌊 In Feb we came across a pod of false killer whales and bottlenose dolphins together. It is rare for us to see these animals in the Hauraki Gulf, with only a few sightings a year. The pod were hunting, breaching, and swimming around the boat as they fed. The False killer whale is scientifically known as Pseudorca crassidens. Pseudorca relates to its common name, meaning "false orca/killer whale" and crassidens means "thick toothed" 🦷

Monday 22nd Jan Safari

Monday last week, passengers on both safaris were lucky enough to encounter oceanic Manta Rays feeding alongside Bryde's whales 🐋 Following @mantawatchnewzealand best practice guide to ensure we didn't disrupt the feeding activity, we were delighted to see the manta somersault feeding around the vessel 😍 and the best part about the manta trusting us was that we managed to collect some epic data to contribute to oceanic manta ray conservation in Aotearoa. Shout out to the awesome passengers who submitted their footage for the database too 💙 Oceanic manta rays are currently classed as data deficient in Aotearoa so any data collected is critical! If you see a manta ray while you're out on the water, remember to take down the date/time, GPS coordinates and photos/videos if you can. Here's to more manta-tastic safaris 🤩

Safari 8th Jan 2024

At the beginning of this week we captured a short video of the gannets and dolphins feeding, and our crew member Ben giving the passengers a bit of info on Gannet diving! 🌊🐟