Anicca: Whales, whales, whales

I’m back in Alaska! Woohoo! I’m back with Amber and Gordon and the boat! Yay Alaska! I certainly did miss it here, I always do. Sometimes I pretend like I don’t, but, truly, I always do. It just can’t be beat. The scenery, the food, the people. Nothing has ever compared to it no matter how far I’ve ventured. There’s something innately awesome about that. It may have something to with the incredible scenery and wildlife or it may be that Alaska feels like home. I do feel that way towards boats now and everyone loves their home. So why wouldn’t I love Alaska in that same way? I feel lucky to have found something as cool as this. Really lucky.

Okay, now that I’ve set the stage, let’s talk about whales.

Whales are pretty cool. I don’t really know what they do all day. Whale stuff I suppose. I just presume whale stuff is pretty cool. Maybe it isn’t, but I think it is. So, the other day we were headed from south Chatham up to Sitka. We were loaded down with around 200 totes of fish, kings and cohos, and only sinking a little bit. It’d been a lot of running the few days before that and we were a little bit ragged from all the nights spent driving up and down the TOTALITY of SE Alaska. Amber was up at the wheel driving and she called down to let us know there were a ton’o’whales happenin’. Not really a big deal because there’re always whales hangin’ about. I mean, it used to be like ‘oh my god whales!’, but now it’s more like ‘cool, some whales, call me if they do something badass’. Sometimes they’ll breach, but you don’t see it all that every time. They have to be in the mood. Lots of the time they’ll do this weird flipper flap thing where they lay on their back and flap a flipper around. It almost looks as if they’re waving at me when they do it. But, mostly, I just watch their little back come out the water when they come up to blow. It’s an awkwardly shaped back too. Well, if you ask me it is. Like they used to have a dorsal fin but it’d been deemed unnecessary during some sort of evolutionary phase. Maybe that's why they're called humpbacks.

The ones Amber had just spotted were off the starboard bow. Humpbacks normally aren’t that exciting. They don’t have the element of grace or danger that orcas do, they just blow a lot. It’s still fun to watch that, don’t get me wrong, but if I’m really comfy somewhere I’m not going to ruin that just to see some little spouts of water being blown upwards from the ocean. Lucky for us, on this particular day, there must’ve been something in the water because the humpbacks were going crazy. We could see them breaching a ways off, sometimes a couple at a time. Really rad. Amber was excited, I was excited, and the greenhorns were REALLY excited. Normally, as we start to get closer to whales, they show us their tail and dive, but Amber took the Deer Harbor out of gear and ghosted up to them. They continued breaching. Over and over and over again. There were these two that just wouldn’t stop breaching and flapping their flippers (flipping their flappers?). Definitely hams. I’m sure they were just trying to impress us with their moves. They certainly weren’t camera shy. It’s a rule of thumb that as soon as I grab my camera the whales disappear, but not this time. They loved it. They bathed in it. They kept at it with zeal, like they were getting paid for this photo shoot. All four of us sat there watching these whales play for half an hour. They were so close that Gordon, the boat dog, was afraid of the giant *SLAP* they would make as they came crashing back down on top of the ocean.