Life on the high seas

The whale watch season is winding down. We've gone down to a single trip a day (most other companies out here did so a few weeks ago), and I believe the humpback fall migration began a week or two ago. Many of the whales we're seeing now are not in our Stellwagen Bank catalog; there are a few hundred humpbacks that spend their summers here, and we have photos of their tail fluke patterns. The ratio of identifiable to anonymous humpbacks has really dropped, and I suspect our whales have started moving south, and have been replaced by whales from up north who are doing the same thing.

On Sunday we had some pretty dirty weather. We had some powerful wind blowing from the east, and our morning trip had to drive straight into 3- to 4-foot seas. Ordinarily that's not too much of a problem, but they were spaced apart just right so that every few minutes our bow would dip down and slam directly into the base of the oncoming wave. And amazingly, this was before we'd even left the harbor. We got about a quarter-mile out of the harbor and had to turn around, to the relief of just about everyone on board. On the way in, we saw another company's boat heading out -- a catamaran like us, but slightly larger and heavier -- and they were bouncing so hard that at one point we saw the foremost third of the hull completely out of the water. They turned around a little bit later as well.

But the rough weather brings out the whales. On Monday we saw close to twenty different whales throughout the day, some of them open-mouth feeding and tail breaching. One of them, a lone humpback, was very active, and after doing some tail breaching and slapping, rolled on its side to slap its pectoral flippers against the water. This is not too odd, but it only hit the water once, and then smacked itself along the side. I got the impression that was not the animal's plan, since it immediately rolled back over and started tail slapping again.

We also had a lot of migrant birds that had been blown out to sea with the high winds we'd had that morning: warblers, juncos, nuthatches, and other little land-birds that were following any boat they could find. I saw a few trying to land on a whale, and others landing on the deck. One passenger kept grabbing birds and 'helping' them off the boat again, although I had mentioned it was best to leave them alone; the captain saw another passenger step on one without noticing. Unfortunate for the birds, since I don't imagine a high percentage of them would find land again.