Thar She Blows

If you read this blog regularly or semi-regularly or just see me posting on social media and having it barely register in your consciousness before moving on to more important things, you'll know that I love wildlife. Finding animals in their natural habitats and just watching whatever they happen to be doing is a huge passion of mine. I find it incredibly rewarding and humbling. It definitely puts my place in the world into some sort of perspective which I find valuable. 

And so, to that end, I've spent a lot of time in my life planning and actually doing just that. Africa. Costa Rica. All over the American west. Maybe a few other spots. There are few experiences in life that I love more.

It didn't always used to be that way. I don't mean the interest; that part was always there. But for a good portion of my life, I chose to not seek out those "in the wild" experiences that I have found so very valuable. Ten or so years ago, I decided to change that. I decided to travel with purpose and make sure I did everything I really wanted to all over the planet before I got too old and set in my ways and routines. That meant a lot more wildlife trips.

Oddly enough, one of the wildlife watching experiences I had engaged in before I started writing this blog was whale watching. In the mid-1990s for some reason I decided that was something I had to do and so I pitched it to my sister. She said yes and we went up to Boston from our parents' house in Connecticut one summer and boarded a boat and set out onto the Atlantic Ocean in search of the largest animals that had ever inhabited this planet. Or close enough anyway. Humpbacks, not blues.

Honestly, that first time sucked. I think we saw a couple of minke whales. Not very exciting. It was so bad that the tour operator gave us credit for a future tour for free. So we went back based on the promise of what we might see, I guess. Then we went again. Then again. And again. For the next three years after our first trip. We ended up seeing some amazing stuff on the water off the coast of Massachusetts, including a few humpbacks feeding right at the surface of the water. That was just mind blowing.

I should note that whale watching is an inherently frustrating activity. You can only see what comes out of the water and that's totally at the discretion of the whales. What most whale watching trips get you is some arched backs as the whale or whales that you are chasing breathe in and out and maybe a tail fluke as they dive. But since I started this blog, I thought it would be cool to blog about an amazing whale watching trip. 

The problem? There hasn't been one.

That doesn't mean I haven't tried. Since I started writing this blog, I've been on whale watching trips off the coasts of Iceland, Hawaii, Alaska, Los Angeles and San Francisco looking for mostly humpbacks and blue whales. I have also spent a couple of hours looking off the coast of Scotland to try to spot orcas in the cold summer waters of the British Isles. 

And truthfully, I have seen whales. Not near Iceland or Scotland but humpbacks near San Francisco and a blue whale (the largest mammal to ever inhabit the planet) near Los Angeles. Heck, I've even seen two full breaches by humpbacks off the coast of Maui. 

So, what's the problem? Well, there was always something wrong. The whales were too far away. The contact with the whales was too short or too fleeting. What the whales did wasn't exciting enough. There were no whales at all (thanks, Iceland!). The trip was cancelled (thanks, Maine!). I had no camera. Or I had a camera but not the right camera. Just something. All the time.

So, I figured this summer, I'd go back to where I started this whole foolish whale-chasing endeavor: Boston, Massachusetts. The New England Aquarium. Go back to the beginning and see what we could find. It had been years since I'd been to Boston at all and probably about 25 years since I'd been whale watching out of that city. And obviously since I've finally started writing about whale watching on this blog, it was good enough. Not the best ever, but good enough.

I should mention here that there have been a number of species of animals that have consistently eluded me over the last 10 years in a meaningful way. Call me spoiled but I've chased flamingos in Africa (twice), Ecuador, Mexico and almost Florida and come away pretty much empty every time. I've also hoped for tons of penguins in Ecuador and New Zealand and gotten pretty much nothing. Whales could be added to that list. I know I'm going to keep chasing these creatures until I get a close up look at a full body breach and have that on film. Hey...you have to have goals in life. 

Tail fluke shots. These are often the best looks at whales on these trips.

Last weekend, I went back to the beginning and joined the O.G. (for me) of whale watch tours: a catamaran out of Boston harbor right next to the Aquarium. Our target that day was the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary, a giant 842 square mile, underwater plateau that stretches from the tip of Cape Cod all the way up to the eastern point of Maine. There is some giant shelf in the ocean below the water in this location that drives nutrients in the ocean into a concentrated area right there for the taking for phytoplankton which draws in thousands of fish which draws in whales. It's like a giant cetacean buffet. 

It takes about an hour and a half to get to Stellwagen Bank from Boston. We never made it. Not last weekend.

A couple of things about whale watching. First, as soon as you can, make sure you secure a spot in the front of the boat, assuming you are on a boat that allows you to move around. When the boat stops and you start watching whales, the boat generally turns to follow whatever it is you have stopped to watch. And the boat generally goes front first when it does this. Second, I am a notoriously bad wildlife spotter on these trips. Not just whale watching. Like all wildlife trips. Not a good spotter of anything under normal circumstances.

So true to form for me, I grabbed a spot in the front of the boat as soon as there was any question about a front spot being in danger of being grabbed by someone else. And totally against form about an hour in and short of Stellwagen, I said not loud enough for anyone really to hear: "that was a whale." Then the boat stopped.

Mother and calf humpbacks lunge feeding.

What we had found about six miles shy of Stellwagen Bank was a mother and calf pair of humpbacks cruising near the top of the ocean with another juvenile whale tagging along. Our boat's naturalist guide, Colin, described this association as likely temporary and he expected that the mother and calf would soon separate from the third whale. But at the time we stopped, the three were just happy being together. Or happy enough to be near each other anyway. 

What we saw over the next hour plus was these three whales feeding. This was not the same type of feeding my sister and I saw twenty plus years ago. That feeding involved some underwater bubble blowing and the whales rushing straight upwards in the water to consume the fish trapped in an underwater, whale-made cone of bubbles. Our three whales this past weekend were lunge feeding, an action where the whales propel themselves along the top of the water and break the surface with their mouths and filter out the water leaving themselves with a mouthful of fish.

Humpback mouths are just huge and when they lunge feed, the skin at the lower half of their jaws expands to hold all the water and fish they scoop up. Once their mouths are full, they finish their lunge action above water by expelling all the water through the baleen plates on their upper jaw allowing them to feed on the fish without getting a giant, hundreds of gallons worth of salt water chaser.

For the whale watching human, this offers the advantage of seeing more of the whales than their arched backs. We actually get to see their heads. And short of jumping in the water (which I feel is frowned upon on these trips), this is the best view of a whale you are going to get unless it jumps out of the water. 

Which they do. Just not for us in late August off the coast of Boston.

Sometimes looking below the waves shows you how big these animals are. Check out the white fin in the second pic.

So if you can't see fully body breaches or fins or tails slapping the ocean or sea, feeding is a pretty good compromise result, particularly if you can get close enough to understand how big these animals actually are. One of the biggest attractions of these trips is being able to understand what you are looking at is actually really, really huge. We got that on this trip through watching the whales surface. We also got it by getting close enough to them to be able to compare their size to our size. Pretty darned big is the impression I got.

The other cool thing about this hour plus that we watched these three whales for was that they never dived. Not really. There were some mini-dives (accompanied by signature fluke raises) but nothing that took any of these three below the waves for a significant amount of time. When that sort of thing happens, there's a good chance you will lose the whales for minutes and maybe for the rest of the day. They can hold their breaths for up to 15 minutes and can move pretty far away in that amount of time. Ours never disappeared from our sight.

This was almost everything I wanted out of a whale watch trip at this time in my life. After some teases, including two over the past year off the coast of California (where we saw whales but didn't really get a sense of how big they are), this was a good affirmation that these things are worthwhile. On my list of dozen or so whale watches, this one was a clear second best, which is good enough for me to blog about and keep going back and back and back. Until I get that close up full body breach by a humpback. Somewhere. Anywhere. Boston's good for whale watching. I'd go back anytime.

Boston.

Colin was right about the temporary nature of the togetherness of this trio of whales, by the way. Before an hour was up, the three had separated.

Before I end this...about those full body breaches in Hawaii. I actually do have one on film. It's below. It was on a video taken with my GoPro. For now, the picture below represents the hope I have every time I board any sort of watercraft to go find whales. Now I just need it a lot closer. Then I'll be satisfied. At least with the whales. Still have to take care of those flamingoes and penguins.