Today was another whale watching day. Vi has a list of things she wants to see while she's with us. The Aurora Borealis and breaching whales had yet to be "ticked off" the list. Both were looking rather doubtful this morning as we plodded along under leaden skies, too far from shore to see much of anything.
We'll need three things to see the Northern Lights: dark skies, clear skies, and well… an active Aurora. I read something that said the best time to see one is late summer or early fall. That might have nothing to do with the phenomenon itself and everything to do with the first two of those three requirements: earlier and it's not dark enough; later and it's not clear enough. In our case we see neither clears skies nor dark skies. So… that's not an item that Vi is likely to be able to tick off her list, on this trip anyway.
As for the breaching whales, all that was needed was a little luck. We've seen plenty of whales, blowing and rolling their tails out of the water, but none that were breaching on this leg - until today.
Shortly before heading into Portage Bay for the night's anchorage, Kay spotted blows on the other side of the sound. This was the same place that Frederic, Marta, Lavanya and Jason had seen some with us as we exited Read Island Cove three weeks earlier. As we did then, we decided to cut the engine and drift a while to see what happened; a lot as it turned out.
The experience was a lot like watching icebergs calve in the sense that we were scanning a large area watching for something to happen in the mist of a lot of sound and activity. From roughly a mile away to the closest individuals, we kept our eyes on dozens of blowing, rolling breathing whales, all up and down the channel. The sound and sight of all that activity with no one else around, was surreal.
Then, once every so often, one of them would come surging up, its entire massive body clearing the water before crashing down again with a thunderous roar that we could hear from miles away. Some were so far away that we couldn't see them through the afternoon haze, but we could hear them; the sound carried easily across the water like cannon fire. Some were much closer; one surprised us, breaching a hundred yards from the boat. Another rolled it's back out of the water within a hundred feet - close enough that Kay started banging the hull to make it aware of our presence. Close was way cool, but too close could be dangerous for it and us, so we tried to keep our distance.
In all we watched the show for a couple hours and Vi got to tick breaching whales off her list. Now if the skies would just clear and the night would get dark for a change.
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