Ticking Another Box

Today I went whale-watching. In my ever-expanding personal bucket list, seeing living whales in the wild has been an elusive goal. I traveled Australia in the exact wrong time of the year to see any there. On a NE roadtrip last year, I made a pretty dangerous overnight trip from Boston to Bar Harbor, ME, to try to catch a 7 am cruise that was later canceled for bad weather. Just this past summer, on my visit here to Monterey to meet my current labmates, yet another attempt was futile. Weather, again.

I told myself that I would absolutely take the first opportunity that arose during my tenure here in Monterey. That opportunity presented itself, and boy was it worth the wait.

When I signed up to head out for it, I really had no idea what whale-watching entailed. To me, it seemed like a grandiose idea, trying to track down animals that spend most of their time underwater, only occasionally breaching the surface to breath, somewhere out there in the huge expanses of the open ocean. I guess there are some patterns as to their migratory routes, their breeding grounds, and their feeding grounds; but this still leaves a lot of search space.

Apparently, whale-watching entails leaning over a boat's rail for several hours (1.5, in our case) until you see a spout, the jet of water that a whale sprays skyward after it breaches to gasp for air. Apparently, they'll take several breaths, then head back down again. Spouts can be spotted from miles and miles away.

It only dawned on me when we were out there that the same tactic with which we were tracking them down was--how does one say "is" in Japanese?--utilized by whalers back in the day. Hence, "thar she blows!"

Had I ever read Melville, I guess I probably would've learned that.

Anyway, spout spotted, the captain of the ship gunned it to their general vicinity. We waited in a hushed silence, bobbing up and downing in the seas while craning our heading back and forth, trying to anticipate where the next spout might appear. We waited quite a while, it seemed, when finally they appeared only a couple of hundred feet from the boat. Again the captain gunned it towards them, only to have them dive again.

The next time they appeared, they were directly beside and beneath the forward hull of the ship, right below me. Both humpbacks came over to the ship, spraying the passengers several times with their spouts of water. We were told that some people think that they'll use a stationary ship as a back-scratch. I'm having a hard time picturing any sort of selectionist mechanism for such a behavior; but they were definitely very curious. They stayed with us for about 10 minutes before getting bored and swimming off.

In the meantime, I learned today that whales have bad breath.