Fun times out in the sanctuary

Most days during the summer, Stellwagen Bank is a pretty nice place to be. It's somewhat sheltered by the Cape, so you don't quite get crazy seas out there too often. We did have some fun out there today though. A low-pressure system was basically sitting up in the Gulf of Maine, kicking up the winds and waves. Even leaving the harbor, we had a bit of shallow chop; not much, but for the harbor it was a lot. By the time we hit the open bay, we were crossing seas of about three feet in height, but the tide was heading out and it wasn't too bad. Even still, lots of folks got seasick before we even found the whales.

Once we were on whales (a mother and calf pair), with the boat sitting in the water, we were more susceptible to the motion of the waves coming from all random directions. And instead of calming down, as the forecast had predicted, they in fact picked up. The waves were at least five feet, and probably six -- eyeballing it by comparing some folks on the bow to the height of the waves, at least.

Five- or six-foot seas doesn't sound like an awful lot, and compared to, say, the incredible mountains of water you see in some pretty extreme areas like Cape Horn, it's really not that much. But even so, when your boat takes a five-foot wave in choppy seas, that means it goes up five feet, and then drops back down five feet a second later, at what can become a pretty steep angle. And then it does it again and again, because 'five feet' is just the average wave height. Some of the other boats we saw out there, smaller V-hulled boats especially, were really being tossed around; the boat I work on is a catamaran, well over 100 feet, and we still had a time working our way back against the waves. For much of the way back we didn't allow the passengers to move around. It was just too dangerous: I was on the top deck, thirty feet above the seas and behind the rail, and was still getting pretty wet as we crashed through the waves.

I don't mind the rough seas too much. I'm not afraid of them, not since you can see Boston, Gloucester, and Provincetown from the sanctuary on a clear day -- even if some accident did happen, we're always close to rescue. But good lord could I do without my passengers getting seasick. It sucks for them, because getting seasick is absolutely no fun, and it sucks for the crew that has to clean it up. After we turned around from the whales, I went out of the wheelhouse with about twenty puke bags in my pocket. I came back with three.

But we finally made it back to town in one piece and got everyone off, most of them happy to be back on dry land. We cleaned up the vomit and spilled food and supplies knocked everywhere by the violent rocking of the boat... and then boarded the next group and went right back out.