At 9AM on July 12th, C, B, I and C, accompanied by our old friend Tara Perry, boarded the Blue Dolphin VIII, a whale watching ship out of Provincetown, MA. After a brief trip out of the harbor, the ship headed north along the tip of Cape Cod into an area the ship's captain and naturalist had seen whales the previous few days. The area is rich with plankton, the base of the ocean's food chain, and therefore the fish which humpback, fin, minke and the other whales that frequent these waters in the summer feed on.
Sure enough, just a few minutes after clearing the Cape people began shouting out that they saw whales, humpback whales. We could see them one or two miles away surfacing to breathe, humping back into the water, sometimes with their tales - flukes - high in the air.
The ship began to move closer to one whale named Reflection. The naturalist, Mike Bertoldi, and the captain see the same whales every year and can identify many of them by the markings on the underside of each whale's fluke. The dorsal (or back) fin is also differently shaped from animal to animal. Professional whale watchers and scientists keep logs of the animals they encounter and share them with each other, so there is a detailed record of the whales that frequent these waters year after year. We followed Reflection who came close enough for us to see her dive and come up for air several times before she moved off.
We had some fairly close encounters, including one which went almost directly under the bow of our ship. It was so close we could see its face, the light color of its side - or pectoral - fins, and tubercles, the bumps on the whale's head. We even got wet with a whale's spray! Mike Bertoldi joked that we had just gotten rained on by whale's snot - but we didn't mind. In the picture below, the white line under the whale is one of its pectoral fins.
Perhaps the most amazing thing we saw was whales feeding. First they slap the water with their flukes and dive down below. Then they create something called a bubble net underneath a school of fish. Blowing bubbles deep in the water they swim in a circle which scares the fish upward and inward, trapped in a tube of bubbles. Then the whales come straight up with their mouths open wide and catch fish at the surface of the water. Sometimes they do this in pairs, as in the picture at the top of this entry.
Catherine knew where to aim her camera to get this amazing picture because you can see the bubble net forming as the dark green water turns light - almost florescent - green in a circle just before the whales come up to the surface. The seagulls know where to go, too, and there are lots of them flying around just above the bubble net hoping to snatch a fish. We could see the gulls flock about the heads of the whales, very close to their mouths. Mike the naturalist told us that he has seen birds get caught in whales' mouths; the whale's throat is only the size of a grapefruit, so it has to surface again to spit the bird out. "The birds never look happy," he said.
Other than these close encounters with twelve or so whales, we were in sight of some two dozen more between one and three miles away. There were moments when we could see whales coming to the surface to breathe, feed, or on one occasion, breach, wherever we looked. They were all around us. It was amazing. We were seeing whales.
That said, the naturalist told us that there are only about 80,000 humpback whales in all the world's oceans. That's not many, perhaps only one tenth their numbers before whaling. Scientists have only been studying whales seriously for about thirty years; naturalists on board the old whaling ships had made drawings of their bodies, inside and out, but we only recently started studying them in the wild.
It struck me that we would be a much wiser people if everyone got a chance to see wild whales at least once. BB
