Hervey Bay YHA Cafe
9/4/00
6:25 PM
Humpback Whale
I am one HAPPY bastard! I don’t know what’s come over me, but I just feel like I’m sitting on top of the world … and I’ve hardly touched this jug of VB in front of me. That’s right, my own jug. ¡Salud, mi papa! (He got me here, after all) Whale watching today was EXCELLENT! There was only about 10 of us on the MS Seaspray. Oh, it was wonderful. We never did see one breach, but I can live with that. We did see our share of pectoral slaps, blows, spy hops, and tail slaps. Magnificant. At first, we didn’t get all that close. We came up on a pod of two who were very active at the surface. A bit later, a second pod of two (followed closely by a couple of other boats) came over and joined the first. They kind of went under and checked each other out, leaving us with only “footprints” (calm, flat spots on the surface caused by the fluke’s displacement of the water beneath). They did come back up and played around for a bit, but the captain took us to another pod. This pod had a big male who was missing his left half of fluke. Amazingly, it was still very laid back and mobile. So we watched those guys for a time and had our afternoon tea. I had coffee — and lots of carrot cake and muffins. Later on, another pod of two big guys joined the other pod. Things got interesting. They came closer to the boat, swam beneath and the like. It was awesome seeing the white blur beneath the hull, knowing it was a massive southern Humpback Whale, Then those guys became more sporadic about their surface activity. Then they made a few passes, and it got interesting again. In the meantime, I spoke with the “crew”. The “crew” consisted of Kelly, the captain’s daughter. She’s a local girl on her way to Europe, Africa, and Asia. Her brother owns a hostel in Zimbabwe. Eh, something to do, I guess. Anyhow, the whales appeared to be tired of us, Kelly seemed tired of my conversation, and the sun was slowly setting. I could feel that the end was near. Off in the distance was another whale doing some pectoral splashes near another boat. I fixed my gaze upon it, since there was nothing better to look at. I was standing on the bow with one other person, oblivious to the waters beneath. Then I heard … no, I didn’t hear anything. It came up silently, unexpectedly. So I suppose I caught it out of the corner of my eye. How could I miss it?! Right beneath me, the head of this massive whale came up out of the water! It was so close!! I couldn’t contain my excitement; I was grinning like a fool, laughing out loud — talking to it, even! Then, THEN it rolled over, stuck it’s head out of the water, and looked right at me! I was staring right into this beautiful creature’s massive eye. Unbelievable. Worth more to me than any breach. For the briefest of instants, I made a connection with … with something so wild, so foreign, so wondrous. Oh, it was wonderful!
And that was about it. We really didn’t see much more from that point on. A very fitting end. Wonderful. Simply wonderful.
So all said and done, we saw 8 or 10 whales and two dolphins on the way out into the bay. In the marina I did see a small (30’ or so) sailing vessel from San Francisco. I thought that was odd. All the way over here in Hervey Bay. Go figure. What else is worth mentioning? Had a car pick me up today instead of a bus … found out a 1-way flight from Brizy to Sydney is $33 AWD. What a time to be backpacking (for longer than THREE WEEKS!) … They’ve actually played Barry White and now “The Hustle” here in the cafe … Okay, so the whales were it for today. Tomorrow I head to Rocky. Whoopie. Oh, I have decided Scott would be a demigod here. A man of his stature and with such moves — in a country without rhythm — he’d do just fine.
Feelin’ the Funk, y’all?
KC