Watching whales can be an exhilarating experience. Seeing some of the world's largest, and sometimes most endangered, species is fast becoming a must-do wildlife experience all over the world. Whale watching can be done for recreational purposes, but also for scientific research and educational reasons.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s whale watching spread throughout the world. It was estimated that in the year 2000, 11.3 million participants participated in this activity, generating around US$1.5bn – making it an important tourism resource and adding an economic reason for whale conservation.
Today whale watching is carried out in various ways:
Water-based, using vessels ranging from kayaks and sailboats through to fishing or whaling boats and custom-built craft that can carry hundreds of people.
Land-based, at strategic lookouts that allow watching of the species that come very close to shore.
Air-based, offering helicopter viewing of species that usually stay some distance from the shore.
Our whale sightings map
Below you will find a link to our NSW whale sightings map, it is created from official sightings up and down the east coast by rangers and our conservation and tourism partners as well as you, our national parks visitors.
You can submit a sighting to this map in three ways, by sending as a tweet to our @wildaboutwhales profile on twitter with the #whaleon hashtag, emailing us at wildaboutwhales@environment.nsw.gov.au, or through our mobile app. It will then be moderated by our team to ensure the validity of the sighting (and that it isn't a whale that was reported earlier). If it passes muster, you'll soon see your sighting on our map. *Please note that moderators are only online between the hours of 9-5 Mondays to Fridays.