Day 284

Dophins in the Gulf of Maine.

Whale watching tickets, a late birthday gift, courtesy of Gene. 

In their element of water, which must have been her element in a previous life, in their summer feeding grounds of the North Atlantic Ocean, which has quite poor visibility, but is very rich in phyto-plankton, there are huge dark supple animals to be seen from a boat.  They are rare, compared to human beings, only about 80 000 world-wide.  They can be noticed by scanning the sea for their "blows", the spout of water caused by their breath when they come up to breathe air like land mammals. like the human race, of which she is often ashamed to be a member.

She remembers a cerise t-shirt she bought and wore proudly when she was a student, with loud black letters protesting whaling, which read, simply, STOP KILLING WHALES.  She remembers an old respected lecturer at the university asking her "What about people?" and in the context of South Africa of the 70's this made her feel guilty at first, then not, as people were not in any danger of dying out, whereas whales like humpbacks were being hunted to the brink of extinction.  She wore the shirt for more than 10 years, until it was worn through with little holes, and in 1986 the International Whaling Commission declared a moratorium on whaling, which still stands today, although Japan and Norway do not recognise it, and continue, senselessly, killing whales.

The biggest threat to whales now is pollution, noise pollution from boats, air pollution and the worst, plastic and every other kind of junk pollution that humans put into the sea. Not one section of the great oceans of the world is free of plastic pollution now, which is unbelievably sad, and yet people carry on using and discarding plastics of every kind.   The gulf of Mexico is chock-a-block full of oil-rigs digging wells, little thought given to long-term consequences, despite the recent most extensive "spill" in history.  Human beings are tiny children still in terms of future thought and planning.

On the way out to Jeffreys Bank, an area frequented by whales in the Gulf of Maine, a little girl could at times be heard singing a toneless sound, on and on, and later, when the whales were sighted, she proudly told the naturalist that she had called the whales! 

They are such beautiful enormous black creatures of the water, enchanting, endlessly fascinating.  They sport huge pectoral fins, the largest of any whale.  The powerful fins can be up to 5 metres long and weigh up to two tons.  They're coloured white so they look bright green under the water, to people looking over the sides of a boat, waiting for the dive, where the tail comes up, spilling water, liquid movement.

The scientific name for humpbacks is Megaptera novaeangliae, which means, The great wing from New England.   Which is wonderful, as she is from New England now too.

It was very cold on the boat, but they had a wonderful amazing day, the two of them, the middle-aged lovers.