Yeah, probably. It's a skimmer, they tend to work in conditions where there's something to skim.
The thing that's amazing to me is the bogus reporting surrounding this thing. I just read a WSJ article that, once again, confused the figure for the amount of water the thing injests with the figure for oil. They then compared it to the amount of oil that's been skimmed so far. This has been happening consistently in most of the stories on A-Whale. It, apparently, has never occurred to most of the media that, if the thing could remove 500,000 barrels of OIL a day, then it could pick up the entire leak in a week, even using the high flow estimate.
Same thing they did with the relief well measured depth verses the actual depth. There were stories saying it was 15 feet from busting through and BP was lying about the August time frame.