On whales

I had my first day on the whale watch yesterday -- it went well enough, though I'm definitely rusty, and it'll take me a couple of trips before I really get my spiel down. At this point, although I know the information perfectly well, the format is still new enough that I'm not presenting it nearly as well as I'd like.

It's different from my past education jobs in two ways: one, I'm not actually interacting with the passengers while we're on whales -- I'm on a mic in the wheelhouse -- and two, I'm structuring my presentation around what the animals are doing, instead of watching for feedback from people. And there's a balance to find between interpreting and over-narrating what we're seeing; we're out on the Atlantic to see whales, not listen to me. That part's not unique to this job, of course.

I worked two trips yesterday. On the first, we saw a single humpback feeding pretty actively a bit off of Stellwagen Bank's northwest corner. It was lunging up and breaking the surface pretty close to the boat, so we got a pretty good look in its mouth, but we only saw the underside of its tail flukes once. It also tail-breach once, which is where the whale throws its body out of the water tail-first. Not as showy as full breach, but it still makes a big splash. On the way in, we passed through a storm that hit Boston in the afternoon -- there was some impressive lightning in the distance, and terrible visibility as we entered the harbor, but the water itself was pretty calm. The head of the storm was a long arc of dark gray clouds that we skirted around. On the second trip, the weather was a bit cloudy in spots but pretty calm. We saw a pair of fins feeding, then moved on to a trio of humpbacks feeding together, with a fourth logging in the water nearby. Once we got near that one, it rolled on its back and then all the way over. There was also a minke or two in the area, but they're small and not very showy, so we stayed with the humpbacks.