6 Feb 2010 Boca de Bahia Magdalena
Final Mag Bay Picassa Pictures
OK, this was an exciting morning! Leaving Mag Bay we were indeed confronted by a gray whale obstacle course. We were sailing, so our maneuverability through the many blows was limited, not to mention that it’s difficult to predict where next a given whale will surface. We figured if we kept to a more or less straight path, they’d maneuver around us. There must have been 20 or more whales around the mouth of the bay as we made our way out. The grays are definitely arriving and they’re feeling frisky; perhaps in anticipation of the party ahead, meeting old friends, greeting new arrivals into the world. It’s a big old whale pow-wow beginning to happen.
As we we approached the entrance, the whales were surfacing closer and closer to the boat. A number of whale watching pangas were puttering around off the two points, and we were staying to the center. One whale emerged close, directly off our starboard bow. Frank ran to the bow to get a good look at her, watched her dive, and said it looked like she was going under us. He turned to make his way back to see where she’d surface behind, when I saw a second MUCH closer whale directly in front of us. From my perspective in the cockpit, I could see no water between her and the boat. Changing course was not an option. I hollered out to him; he turned (it seemed in slow motion to me) just as the knobs on her back began their roller coaster descent towards our bow, in perfect alignment. From the cockpit her back appeared to tower over him. Frank did not throw up his hands and yell like a good roller coaster rider would have, instead he grabbed the bow pulpit hard, backed his spine against the forestay, clenched his teeth (along with every muscle and pore in his body), and braced to either be hammered, or tossed in the ocean. I think I held my breath or maybe I hollered “Frank” again, I have no memory of me, only of whale and Frank, I was sure that this day, we’d be doing some in situ destructive testing of 3/16″ Corten steel*. Instead, she slid gracefully past our keel with no impact at all, not a bump, not a nudge, not even the sound of barnacles separating from blubber. Frank said her tail came within 12″ of the bow. I think he has, permanently emblazoned in his mind, the exact configuration of barnacles and scratches on that tail. He’d be able to pick it out of a line up; he definitely got that license plate number. Even if you take Frank’s “less than a foot” and double it to accommodate for the fisherman compensation factor and for the fact that our system of measurement is not his native language – that’s still 2′ away; less than the distance between the front of your desk and the back. Add the four feet from the waterline to the deck at the bow, and Frank was standing 6′ over a whale’s tail (better than 6′ under!).
The kids witnessed none of this, having retired into their books and journals, tired after an hour’s worth of exclamations from us, “There’s one!, fluke!, blow! closer!, breach!, wow!, and look at that!” how quickly kids grow to think the amazing is normal; they’re little adaptation machines. “Don’t whales wave their tales at boats all the time?” Frank and I on the other hand, may not fully recover from this one. I can still feel the after-ache of adrenalin in my thighs; it’s hard to run it off on a boat. Still, once we’d unglued Frank’s hands from the bow pulpit – the first thought was “What an awesome animal! Such a big beautiful beast!”
Catching (and nearly loosing) a Dorado later in the day was anticlimactic, but welcome. I think everything else for the next year will be anticlimactic but welcome!
xoxomo
*Math problem of the day: We were going 6 knots and weigh 20 tons. She too was probably going 6 knots, but weighs 2-2.5 tons per meter, (12-14 meters for the average whale…newborns are 4-5 meters, she looked pregnant…) Say between 25 and 40 tons. What would the impact load be, and extra credit for the engineer familiar with the material properties of 3/16″ Corten and the configuration of our hull: How good were our odds of staying afloat?