Whale Migration

A walk out to Mori Point yesterday yielded this shot. The folk dotting the shoreline (break out your magnifying glasses) are watching for breaching whales. They (and I) were not disappointed.

The whole experience was a trip. I'd look in vain for a bit of whale or evidence of blowholes a-blowing, and just as I would turn away or blink or get distracted in some way a whale would show itself. My silly camera phone could barely record any of it, alas.

When I was a kid, I don't recall whales coming through town. And, if they did go up the coast, then, perhaps, their path was farther out from shore. Yesterday, the tide was very low. Some of the whales were breaching just beyond the breakers. It was nuts that they were so close.



Can you see in the above picture a bit of black jutting up from the ocean waters? Well, that's a whale! It's the one shot I could manage. Also wonderful was being able to hear the puff of air being pushed out through the whales' blowholes.

At one point I stood at the edge of Mori Pt. with a few other lookie-loos. We waited. We watched. The intermittent cries of cormorants sunbathing on a rock in the distance filled the air. I could also hear, like a sort of back beat, soft chirps coming from the hillside. And then a geyser-like eruption from the water. Pfuuuh! A blowhole. Then black. A whale body. A head. A tail. It was marvelous.

What I had planned as an hour walk became a two-hour meander. -lots of standing, staring at the ocean, turning to move on, and then turning back for one more look toward the water and, hopefully, a whale.

The view as I walked back to the car.