Thinking about Whales

You’re wondering, “Why is he thinking about whales and putting up pictures of bears?” Simple answer. I’m thinking about whales because I’m reading Moby Dick. It was a free download on our iPod Touch and I’ve never read it before. I don’t have a convenient recent whale picture so I used a picture of the largest mammals that I have photographed recently, the shy gentle bears that somewhat regularly visit our backyard.

Moby made me think of two impressive whale experiences that predated my blogging habit. I felt they needed to be recorded since whales, along with everything else in the ocean, appear soon to be extinct if we don’t change our ways. Hopefully not, but possibly in the next generation or two, nobody will have any more first-hand whale experiences.

OK, first whale experience: We lived many years on Eld Inlet, the southern tip of Puget Sound. We saw lots of harbor seals there. That was novel to me as a Carolina boy where, growing up, I thought you had to go to Eskimo-land to see any seals. One day soon after we moved into the Eld Inlet place, my parents came to visit. I quickly got my father down to the gravelly beach that we semi-privately shared with four other property owners. I proudly pronounced that we could dig our own clams, grow our own oysters, and sometimes we even saw seals. As if right on queue, directly in front and close in to shore, a huge mass rose to the surface and blew a V-shaped spout. My father frowned and opined, “That ain’t no seal!” Clearly it was a gray whale, the only huge thing other than the distinctly-finned Orca that might venture so far south in the sound. We watched it spout several more times and it clearly was hanging around for a bit. Leaving my father there, I ran up to the house to fetch down my kayak and camera. My mother was hollering after for me not to get into the water with any whale. I chased it around the inlet racing toward each spout to get a close snapshot but each time it rose in a different location hundreds of feet away. There were no good pictures.

I got another chance for a close encounter a couple of years later. The neighbors reported that a grey whale had been hanging out all day feeding in the bottom muck in the cove across the inlet from us. Wife and I again mounted kayaks and crossed the inlet. This time the whale was working a much smaller area and it was easy to get close. More sensible kayakers were also there to observe from a sensible distance. With all the good sense of a guy who climbs wet ladders barefooted, I charged up right over the location of the last couple of spouts. Suddenly the whale rose beside me and exchanged breath with a huge, “Chug; suck” sound. Mist from the spout drifted over me. I have to say I did not smell the foul odor that some people report from close encounters with whale spouts. However, what I will never forget was the deep resonance of that sound. It sounded like someone had briefly vented a steam valve in a mine tunnel. It gave me a sense of the huge volume of the breathing tube and lungs in this gentle but mighty creature.

Second whale experience: This one concerns Orcas. Orca whales are cute, smart, and relatively small as whales go, though hellishly much bigger than about anything else that isn’t a whale. They’re the ones that, if unfortunate enough to get captured, end up doing tricks in sea aquariums until they get disgusted with the life and decide to drown their trainers. Most Orcas live in pods, don’t roam too far from home, and enjoy a good diet of fish, like salmon. However, some Orca pods are the real rouges of the sea. They are transients and roam far and wide to munch on big animals like seals and even other larger whales. Several years ago the town of Brinnon, WA on Hood Canal (not really a man-made canal but a fjord wide and deep enough for submarine traffic) was experiencing a seal problem. Normally popular and welcome, the seal population had grown way too big for their local habitat. They were gobbling up lots of fish, fouling the water with their excrement and causing commercial oyster beds to shut down. Well, one day we were driving along the canal near Brinnon and saw a crowd of cars pulled over to the side of the road. We pulled over to see the attraction. The rogues had come. The water was filled with tall Orca dorsal fins racing back and forth, singly and in groups. No boats were out. We didn’t see this ourselves, but some friends who live in Brinnon told us they had seen seals far from the water and still heading for higher ground. While walking down to witness the spectacle our friends passed a seal that looked at them curiously as if to say, “You guys are going the wrong way. Are you nuts? Get further inland.” When the rogues had left the seal population had been culled down to a fraction of its size.