WHALE GEEK WATCHING

By CINDA CHAVICH

(BAY BULLS, NEWFOUNDLAND) – Bobbing for a week in the chilly Atlantic, swaddled in a heavy survival suit and waiting for a marine mammal to show itself, may seem like an odd way to spend your summer vacation.

Watching for whales is always a bit of a crap shoot. But once you’ve seen a massive pair rise to the surface, spout their fishy breath skyward and dive in unison, it’s like rolling doubles. The immediate jolt of adrenalin, coupled with the anticipation of the next lucky strike, is addictive. And when you’re in Newfoundland in mid summer, among the largest gathering of humpbacks in the world, you’re almost guaranteed to hit the jackpot.

Those of us participating in Wildland Tours’ Whale Study Week are certainly getting our regular fix of flukes, fins and other fantastic displays of whale behavior, cruising all day in an open boat with former fisherman Michael Gatherall and biologist Dave Snow.  By day two, I have assumed the role of official photographer, surveying the dark sea through a 300 mm lens from the back of a six-person skiff.

“Fluke! Fluke!” cries the elderly Dutchman next to me excitedly, as the glistening black fin of a 40-foot humpback breaks the water near our small craft. I raise my camera and the motor drive clicks off five fast frames as the whale rolls her back into the wheel-like curve that signals her wide tail will soon lift elegantly out of the water.

It’s the way researchers know which whales are about and Snow, our guide on this mid-summer week of whale watching, is one of the amateur experts trying to catalogue the resident population of humpbacks, using fluke photos.

With all of the summer whale activity in these Newfoundland waters – The Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) says 3,000 to 4,000 endangered humpbacks spend the summer off the coast of Newfoundland feeding on capelin – it’s not surprising that this region also attracts a lot of devoted whale watchers.

While Snow has seen all of this – and more – before, like the other whale-loving tourists on board, he’s a self-avowed whale geek, smitten with his job and just as excited by the last tail sighting of the day as the first.

Even a side trip to the dreary DFO offices in St. John’s can put a spring in Snow’s step.

“There have only been 100 giant squid taken on earth and a third of them have been taken right here,” he explains excitedly, as we traipse through the bowels of the government building to a massive tank, where a 31-foot giant squid has been entombed in formaldehyde.

“We always wondered what sperm whales ate and this is it – they have teeth so they crush giant squid and swallow them.”

After a lesson on baleen – the long keratin fibres that let humpbacks and other baleen whales screen much smaller fish and krill from ocean waters – we head up to Cape Spear, following Snow along the blustery red cliffs to some prime shore-side whale watching spots.

Snow lives and breathes whales. But my tour mates – a television producer from New York, a retiree from Britain and a young woman from Montreal – admit they’re equally enamored of these big, benign creatures.

“Whales and birds seem to be a recurring theme in my travels,” muses Carol Wood, the New Yorker who has signed up with Earth Watch trips to identify orcas in the San Juans, watched whales in the Baja, and joined Snow for two-week whale study adventures in northern Newfoundland and Labrador.

Oddly, it’s often women who become repeat customers on Snow’s intensive whale weeks – drawn to the huge nurturing mammals and willing to travel the world to catch another glimpse.

“When I first came to Newfoundland in 1994, I came to Trinity – that was my first whale,” says Marion Willaston, a British birder who has traveled to New Zealand, the Baja and even Antarctica to see whales.

What is it about whale watching that is so addictive? Perhaps it’s the mystery of their massive presence beneath the dark water and the thrill of anticipation – for you may sit for hours with nary a spout, then see shiny hump and fins breaking the surface all around, only to have them disappear again on a whim, leaving nothing but a frothy wake. So powerful, yet so curious and tolerant, these intelligent mammals offer us land-locked humans a glimpse into the unexplored depths where they are the reigning species.

“I’m a whale-a-holic, an amateur scientist, I guess you’d say,” says Young who spends her days up in the “crow’s nest” – the perch high above the deck of the O’Brien’s big whale watching tour boat – snapping tale flukes.

“It started as a summer hobby a couple of years ago, now we have 174 whales listed and photographed,” says Young, flipping open her photo album, filled with colour shots of dozens of whale tails.

“Up here we have the biggest summer gathering of humpbacks in the world and they’re the least studied,” adds the volunteer who, like Snow, submits her sightings to the Atlantic Whales research website, an online catalogue of 1,800 individual humpbacks and other whales, developed to aid whale researchers and students.

“We get some good science out of these trips we do,” says Snow, who co-ordinates the Newfoundland and Labrador portion of the global census of humpbacks, and is also helping to identify pods of Atlantic orcas in the region.

Former commercial fishing families, like the O’Briens and Gatheralls, have turned their years of experience in these coastal waters into successful bird and whale watching businesses. Commercial whaling ended in Canada in 1972 and in towns like Dildo, where Gerald Smith is now a whale tour guide and local historian, watching has replaced harpooning.

“I whaled for 40 years,” says Smith, who also runs a small whale museum filled with black and white photos showing how whale meat was cut by hand in the late 1960s at the South Dildo Whale Plant. The ongoing moratorium on commercial whaling has helped this marine mammal edge back from the brink of extinction, but the humpback whale remains an endangered species.

“I do believe there’s more money in shooting them with cameras, than shooting them,” says Smith. “I don’t think whales are increasing enough to open up the hunt again.”

Back in Bay Bulls, Loyola O’Brien is tucking into a hamburger at the tour company’s shoreside restaurant, where his extended family once headed out for cod.

“This is how things are after changin’,” says O’Brien, “we ate fish every day, and now we have to substitute with chicken and pork and beef.”

“We were the first people to get out of the fishin’ here,” he continues, “but we didn’t know the whales were an attraction.

“For us guys they were a nuisance – they could drag off your nets and gear into deep water and you’d never see it again.”

And now these former fishermen and whalers are conservationists. Saving the whales is Snow’s ongoing mission, too.

“The population biologists say they don’t see any discernable drop in numbers here but you just have to look total numbers – they’re a fraction of what they were,” he says. “The Atlantic grey whale is extinct, the bowhead whale is only found in the high Arctic and the blue whale is in hard shape.”

“We have a small network of whale enthusiasts who keep track of the whales but it’s not enough. We are starting a campaign for marine parks around Newfoundland and Labrador, because there’s no place in the North Atlantic where whales and fish can live in peace.”

The world’s whales were hunted nearly to extinction by 1947, when the International Whaling Commission (IWC) was formed to control the hunt. While total whale numbers rebounded somewhat, by 1986 the IWC had placed a moratorium on open sea commercial whaling. Killing any of the world’s remaining whales for profit is controversial at best, but countries like Japan and Norway continue to hunt whales, using a loophole in the IWC rules allowing “research kills”, and provoking confrontations with environmental groups battling to protect them. According to a recent article in National Geographic magazine, a single fin whale can bring $1.5 million in Japan and the meat is a delicacy that often regularly up in top Tokyo restaurants.

Ironically, it was actually bird watching that fishermen like Michael Gatherall thought would attract tourists to their depleted cod fishing grounds, less than an hour’s drive south of St. John’s. Here the Witless Bay Ecological Reserve – three islands accessible only to scientific researchers – is home to more than 50 species of birds, the largest concentration of sea birds on the planet and the biggest puffin colony in North America.

While most whale-watching tours still routinely include a pass alongside Gull Island’s steep cliffs, where thousands of cute, parrot-like puffins perch in the grass, and murres, guillemots and kittiwakes raise their chicks on rocky ledges, it’s the whales that draw crowds.

Gatherall noses his six-passenger speed boat along the cliffs dripping with white guano, while thousands of screeching seabirds darken the skies like a Hitchcock movie. But soon we’re off to the open sea again in search of humpbacks, minkes and porpoises.

It’s quite the display, but after a full day at sea, scanning the bobbing horizon through a zoom lens, I’m frankly turning a little green. I take several dozen shots, then stow my gear and close my eyes, just as a curious humpback begins to “spy hop” out of the water, peering above the surface to watch the watchers.

I retrieve my camera and as I lift it, she lunges from the sea in a dramatic breach, her entire body clearing the water and landing with a mighty and truly amazing crash directly beyond our open boat.

At that moment, I am snagged, hooked and reeled in – a new whale geek is born. Months later I am still telling the tale, another whale obsessed woman planning her next encounter with these mysterious 40-tonne leviathans, and thinking daily about saving the seas

IF YOU GO:

Whale watching is the fastest growing wildlife-based viewing industry in the world, growing to an estimated $1.5 billion (US) business by 2000. While some experts argue that any human presence in whale habitat is stressful to the animals, others say raising awareness of these endangered species and their ocean environment is a net benefit to whales, increasing public support for the continued ban of commercial whaling. Whale watching operators follow a code of conduct to avoid disruption of whales and report those who don’t.

It’s not a question of if you’ll see whales in Newfoundland. It’s when – and how many, and what kind. The largest gathering of humpbacks in the world is found here from June through September – the region is also known as “The Minke Way.” Maybe that’s why it’s so easy to get hooked.

Wildland Tours Whale Study Week is a great way to join a small group of whale lovers for actual whale research. There are four week-long tours in July, plus a two-week tour off northern Newfoundland in September. Prices start at $2,500 pp. www.wildlands.com

Gatherall’s Puffin and Whale Watch Tours, Bay Bulls, Nfld. Daily 90-minute tours for groups in a high speed catamaran or smaller craft. www.newfoundland-whales.com

O’Brien’s Whale and Bird Tours, Bay Bulls, Nfld.

Whale watching tours, birding tours, kayak adventures, dinner theatre, and zodiac tours – with a good restaurant for traditional local dishes like cod tongues and bake apple desserts. www.obriensboattours.com

(This story originally appeared in the Globe and Mail newspaper)

©Cinda Chavich 2007

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