Wednesday whales - 15 April 2009, Kaikoura

[skyring]

In the morning light, our hostel showed itself to be every bit as fresh and friendly as last night. We took a stroll down the main street for some breakfast foods, enjoying the cool and empty town. Boutiques, bars, brasseries – this must be a great place to relax!

Alas, we only had a short while before we had to hit the road, retracing our steps down to Kaikoura for a lunchtime whalewatching cruise. I resolved to return and spend a day or two here. One day.



Discoverylover came down to breakfast with a little plastic eye stuck on her nose. “It came off my toy frog, and I didn’t want to waste it!” she explained.

We made breakfast, browsed the internet, patted Pepper the cat, packed up, and bestowed copious compliments upon a blushing Edwin.

This time around, MissMarkey left me for Kevin’s car, and Alkaline-Kiwi climbed in beside me. Discoverylover remained curled up in a backseat nest.

We entered “Kaikoura” into the GPS, and Wanda recalculated us around Hanmer Springs for a while before we got back out onto the main road where we should have been all along.

As we drove back along between lofty mountains, green hillside farms, golden autumn trees and winding rivers, I had the pleasure of listening to Alkaline-Kiwi describe her life, ranging from the wild West Coast town of Greymouth to her current existence as a tourism student in Auckland.

Discoverylover passed over a bag of licorice allsort offcuts from the back seat, and we happily munched our way down the valley, at least until I took a curve a little too sharply, sending Ringbear sliding across from one side of the dashboard to the other, and a pile of licorice allsorts cascading into my lap.

Alkaline-kiwi retrieved most of them, but some had slid under the seat, and some had found their way into my trouser pockets. There was only so much territory she was game to cover, she retreated to her side of the car, and I was left digging pieces of licorice out of the upholstery for the next day or two.



The ride down to the sea was every bit as magical as the drive up had been. This time we had the added bonus of full daylight, and the colours came alive. A row of golden poplars against dark green, a snowy peak in the not-so-distance, a rustic scene of abandoned farm machinery, and never a straight and level stretch of road, unless we were passing through one of the several blink-and-you-miss-‘em villages.

At one point MissMarkey must have prevailed on Kevin to pull up for a moment, because we rounded a corner and there they were on the side of the road, MissMarkey and Kev busily taking photographs of the stunning scenery.



Alkaline-kiwi jumped out and ran into Earok’s arms. Once we were done taking photographs, we pried them apart and continued on.

The whalewatching tours operate out of an old railway station right at the entrance to Kaikoura. When I saw that it bore a sign saying “Whaleway Station”, I knew we were in good hands.



The tickets were actually fairly pricey, but I took the view that I’d come a long way for a unique experience. It wasn’t something I could do at home. Or anywhere else in the world, realistically. Sperm whales are creatures of the great deeps, and it is very rare to find them so close to land as at Kaikoura.

Alkaline-kiwi and Earok had decided to keep their money for other things and went off to explore the town.

We remaining four checked in with our internet tickets and had a quick lunch at the cafeteria at one end of the station. Fairly pricey food as well, but it was a solid walk down the long car park to find anything cheaper in town.

Good souvenir shop, heavy on whales and dolphins. Videos and books. I snuck in a quick release of “Moby-Dick”, and Kevin had another themed release. “Whale Road” – I had to smile.

We were called into an annex for a video safety briefing. There was a demonstration of what to do in an emergency, how to put lifejackets on, where to exit the passenger cabin, how to jump into the water. The presenter finished and asked if there were any questions. A worried-looking boy stuck up his hand.

“Do we HAVE to jump off the boat?”

On that note, we set off for the cruise in a bus. We were amongst the first on, so we headed to the back of the bus where the big kids sit. This was fun on the brief ride down the highway to the other side of the peninsula, but as any veteran airline traveller will tell you, it means you get off last.

Which meant that we got on the whale-watching boat last and took up the last few seats, scattered here and there amongst the rows. I was lucky, and got to sit up near the front, where I had an excellent view of the big video screen, hooked into a computer.

The crew introduced themselves. Fraser was our presenter, running the video, Jamie and Abbey were the spotters, lifting their shapely backsides into chairs set just under the roofline, heads poking out into the view, and Quint was the captain, driving the catamaran cautiously back out of the tiny rock harbour and then speeding off into the Pacific.

The deep water begins six kilometres out and during the transit we were instructed to keep our seats. When sealife became visible, we would be allowed out onto the viewing areas, but while the boat was moving at speed, it was safer to be seated.



Fraser explained the peculiar underwater landscape here with the aid of a 3D computer graphic, showing the water draining away from a kilometre-deep trench cutting through the continental shelf almost into downtown Kaikoura. A tiny computer representation of our boat and a sperm whale about the same size floated impossibly high over the drained ocean floor.

Spermwhales found their food on or near the seabed, Fraser told us, and they dove vertically down a kilometre or more, finding and stunning their prey of deep sea fish and squid with powerful sound waves. Each dive took forty-five minutes, after which they replenished their oxygen on the surface, each huge lungful throwing a spout of fine spray into the air. Ten to fifteen minutes, and down they went again.

There were ways of finding the whales, we were told. None of them intrusive, none of them harmful. No sonar beams, no tracking devices. Instead the whalewatching fleet exploited the habits of the sperm whales. Each whale tended to surface where it had dived (or “sounded”, which was whale talk for the same thing, Fraser explained), so when a whale vanishes under the water, the boat logs the spot on GPS, and shares the information with other boats in the fleet. Forty-five minutes after sounding, another boat would be waiting for the surfacing whale.

They listened on underwater microphones for the sounds from the whale as it fed far below the surface, and zeroed in on the direction. And they looked up at the sky, where light aircraft flew even more well-heeled tourists out over the ocean, with a far better view than our spotters had, three metres above the waves.

When the planes begin circling, they have a whale in sight.

“So,” Fraser said, “we’re pretty confident we’ll see some whales today. We’ve got a couple of spots we’ll be aiming for.”

As we sped out, the hull vibrating over the chop, we passed a deep sea trawler heading in. Fraser scowled at it, but pointed out the seabirds following in its wake, “Gulls, petrels, mollymawks and a wandering albatross.”

I’ve seen albatrosses down at Dunedin, where they come to raise chicks on the headland guarding the harbour, and mighty birds they are, holding their wings out straight as an airliner, never moving a muscle yet gliding majestically along on the unseen currents of the wind.

Fraser went on to say that the trawlers disturbed the sealife and had driven the whales away in the past, but, “we’ve been seeing whales this morning, so we’re very hopeful they’ll be in the area.”

As we got further out, the boat began slowing, the swell becoming more apparent. The radio crackled, and the heads of the lookouts swivelled around.

“Keep your eyes open,” Fraser advised, “and if you see any whales, don’t be shy about letting us know!”

No fear of that. I was sitting on the middle aisle, but my eyes were hanging out of the boat on both sides. I’ve seen whales at sea before, and what attracts the gaze is the spout, because frankly the dark blue back of a whale blends perfectly with the deep blue of the ocean.

What I really wanted to do was to spot the whale first, stand up and yell out in my best and biggest voice, “Thar she blows! Fine on the larboard mizzen, capn’!”

Suddenly Jamie pointed, and our boat turned in that direction. We manoeuvred a little, and then our lookouts were scrambling down, opening doors, clipping them back.

“There’s plenty of room at the rails for everybody,” Fraser said, a broad smile on his face, “And the stairs to the top deck are at the rear of the cabin. Just remember to hang on to the rails, it’s a wee bit rough out there.”

On his signal we surged out, and frankly, I didn’t mind one little bit, because there, off our starboard quarter, was a real live sperm whale. A wrinkled mass of sea coloured skin, one might have thought it a floating log, except that, as I watched, a puff of white spray appeared.

Cameras were clicking all over the boat, mine included.

I was glad of the zoom function on my camera, and I got a few reasonable shots, but it was very difficult to pick a moment when the waves gave a reasonable view, or to catch the quickly-disappearing spray of the spout.

If I’d been thinking, I would have set my camera to take continuous photographs – it can do several each second – and I’d be sure to get a few excellent shots amongst all the mediocre ones. Some cameras have a three shot burst mode – each time you press the button it takes three pictures in a row – and this would be perfect.

The battery light on the camera was intermittently flashing, and I had neglected to put some spares in my pocket. That’s another problem with travelling – finding time to recharge all the various electronic devices that tangle up our lives nowadays. As much as possible, I try to get gadgets that take standard AA cells, but it can be hard to get enough time to charge them up fully, and even though I’d put fresh batteries in before leaving, they’d obviously not been 100%.

I think we got our full fifteen minutes with the whale. Another boat in the fleet came up and cruised parallel on the other side of the whale, who was swimming along steadily, spouting every fifteen seconds or so and recharging his own batteries.



And then he arched his back, lifted his tail flukes into the air, and was gone.

We were hustled back inside, the crew counted heads and checked the outer decks, and then we were off racing, bouncing along over the waves to another good spot.

Fraser smiled at his computer.

“We’ve got a match!” he exclaimed, and then went on to tell us about the unique patterns each whale carries on the ragged rear end of their flukes. As our whale had gone down, a photograph had been snapped, and a match found on the database.

Fraser showed us the file image on the big screen. “Can you see anything distinctive about his tail?” he asked us.

Cripes. You see one whale tail you’ve seen ‘em all. They all look exactly the same. Like fingerprints.

“See this shape here?” he pointed. “Looks a bit like the beak and wings of a bird. So this one’s called ‘Manu’, which is Maori for bird. He’s a male, and he’s one of the permanent residents here.”

I was impressed. I was impressed with the whole professional operation. Safety, comfort, information, entertainment and whales on a glorious sunny day out at sea.

More chatter on the bridge, more pointing fingers, and we were released onto the viewing decks for a second whale. We came up from behind, this time, and then moved over to a downsun position, so that we were looking back towards land. The sight of that great sperm whale swimming through a silver ocean, high mountains reaching up out of the coastal haze to bite the sky with snowy teeth is one I’ll never forget.



We had ten minutes or so with this whale before it too raised its flukes high and dived a kilometre straight down.

Back inside, sitting down, and as we went racing off, Fraser identified this whale as Tutu, named after a Maori god.

We were done with whales for a bit, it seemed, because we were zooming in towards the coast. I gazed out through the window at the Kaikoura peninsula, a soft green series of curves with the jagged white-tipped mountains behind. Sun shining on haze, blue water and white spray.

A glorious day – I had beheld Leviathan!

We slowed, the cabin doors were opened and when I came out on deck, I was in the middle of the biggest school of dolphins I had ever seen.

There were hundreds of them all around us, leaping, swimming in twos and threes, big ones, baby ones, common dolphins, dusky dolphins and a few seals. For hundreds of metres there were dorsal fins cutting through the water, dolphins leaping into the air – dozens at a time – sleek shapes just under the water beside us, distant splashes. It was one of the most extraordinary and exciting sights of my life.




And then, as if some sudden command had been given, these hundreds of dolphins turned and went leaping and splashing away inshore. One minute we were in the middle this vast school, the next they were all gone, just splashes and distant shapes.

I felt that this was the end of our adventure, but my heart was full. The whales, the dolphins, the sunny day, the mountains and the blue ocean full of life – what a day!

And then, as I gazed happily around, suddenly we were surrounded by dolphins once again. Magic!

But all good things must end, and before long we were seated back in the cabin, our boat was pulling into the tight little harbour, and we thanked the crew with grateful smiles.

The bus arrived in a minute, full of the next boatload. This is a tight and efficient operation here, and we filed onto the bus, sat down, and pulled out to the highway as the boat was leaving its snug port for another run.

My best admiration was for Fraser, doing all the talking. He must have given the same spiel hundreds of times, but he sounded fresh and enthusiastic, as if we had been his first passengers.

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