My Whale of a Tale
While filling out one of the many forms for the ARC, I was asked why I made the decision to do the ARC Atlantic. High on the list of reasons was my desire to see the wildlife. More specifically, I wanted to see a whale in its natural habitat.
It’s not that I haven’t seen a whale in nature before. I have: once when we were southbound on the inside passage of an Alaskan cruise, I saw a mother and its calf near Victoria Island. And then a second time, off the shores of Sri Lanka with about a thousand other people on tourist boats of various sizes, all chasing down the latest sighting.
So yes, I wanted the excitement of seeing a whale again, only this time in a more intimate and less intrusive way.
Yesterday afternoon, after being on deck for quite a while sharing a plate of cheese and crackers with the crew, I went below deck to my cabin for a rest. It wasn’t five minutes later that simultaneous with an odd noise outside my portholes that I heard Steve yell “Whale, there’s a whale!”. My heart immediately leapt with excitement equaled only by the swiftness that I launched my body off my bed, sweeping up my camera phone and dashing to the gangway.
By then my mind had processed what I had heard - the expulsion of air through the whale’s blow hole. I joined the crew assembled on the port side, my camera on video, hopeful that he would surface again so I could his majesty. Steve said the whale had been less than a boat’s length away - that is the intimacy I had been longing for. It’s impossible, of course, to know when and where the whale would surface again, but for almost 10 minutes I sat on the deck, scanning the waters in a state of diminishing hope. Alas, his breath lasted longer than my patience. I had missed this opportunity and could only wish that in the coming days, a sighting would be made while I was above deck.
Yes, I have to accept that this is the one that got away.
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