Absolute Caribbean Sailing Charters Inc.
|
|
The Virgins Islands are known for their natural beauty: Mountains jutting from the sea, pristine water, white sand beaches and reefs teaming with tropical fish. They are also known for their excellent trade-wind sailing, sheltered waters and lovely harbors. But they are not often recognized for their whale sightings, even though experts include them in the world's top twenty whale-watching areas. Like the snowbirds, the great whales visit each winter, migrating through the Virgins on the way to and from their West Indian breeding grounds. As a Crewed Charter Captain I look forward to these annual visits. This year my first sighting occurred while I was tacking up the Sir Frances Drake Channel. Just west of Nanny Cay I spotted two blows, then the whales. Two humpbacks playing hide and seek while diving and swimming up the waterway. As they faded into the distance I envied their ability to travel east. Unlike sailors, they were little affected by adverse winds and currents. My second encounter was not a sighting, but more a "smelling" and a "hearing". After dinner, a guest returned from her deck-walk saying, "It smells like fish out there". When I reached the cockpit I caught the scent to which she was referring: A smell not unlike that of a fish cannery or freshly used nets: It was the scent of whale breath. I explained its source, and everyone agreed to spend the evening on deck, peering into the darkness, listening for sound of blows, and sniffing for the scent of whales. We never saw them, but as we sat on deck identifying constellations we heard the blows and smelled the breath of at least two whales. I enjoyed two more sightings before this year's most memorable encounter. I was sailing a pleasant reach west of Tortola when my guests yelled, "there's a whale!" I looked over in time to catch the end of a breach. A I studied the area, the big humpback breached again. At the same time I noticed two other whales. From experience I knew they were likely to swim southeast and cut between the islands. I tacked the Dreamwalker, sailed between the whales and the cut, and hove to. A few minutes later they surfaced less than fifty yards northeast of us. One of the three looked at us and sounded, later surfacing a half-mile away. The other two, a mother and calf, leisurely swam toward the boat. Then, not twenty yards away, they slowly circled the Dreamwalker, the calf diving and spinning, lobtailed and pec-slapping all the way. After completing their half circle they stopped and played, while we clicked cameras and watched in awe. The calf gabe us so many pec-slaps that it was difficult not to imagine him saying, "Hello! Thanks for not running your engine and spooking us."
A HUMPBACK CALF WAVES HELLO!!! These, like all my whale sightings, remind me of my first encounter with a great whale. Six Bareboat Certification students and I were sailing from St. Croix to St John. We were ten miles south of our destination, near Ram's Head. I was relaxing and watching the helmsman, while the rest of my students practiced eye-ball navigation, trying to pick out St John's salient features in order to establish our position via a hand bearing compass. Without warning, the largest living creature I had ever seen leaped out of the water. Overcoming my shock, I screamed: "There's a whale!" No one else had seen it! I was astonished. How could anyone miss something the size of a bus breaching not fifty yards from the boat ? With my Polaroid's I could yet see the mammoth creature just under the surface. He looked like reef: A grayish background mottled with barnacles and other crustaceans. I pointed, but no one else saw my "reef". Jokes about their delusional captain soon occupied the crew-until the Great whale breached again. This time everyone saw it. I didn't know it at the time, but we had just seen the largest animal to have ever inhabited the earth: The great blue whale. At maturity, the blue can weigh 130 tons and measure a hundred feet. Like other members of the Rorqual family, including the humpback, it is a baleen or gilled rather than toothed whale: It feeds by gulping as much as fifty tons of water which it exhales through its baleen strainer, trapping the small organisms that make up its diet. Its appetite is huge. A blue can consume six tons of krill a day. Because they are solitary creatures who remain offshore, we rarely see blues in the Virgin Islands. Most often it is the gregarious humpback that attracts our notice. The humpback is easy to identify. It has a stout black and white body and extremely long flippers or pectoral fins. They measure about one third of its body length and, like its body, are generally black above and white below. Its long pectoral fins help to make it the most acrobatic of member of its family. It breaches (leaps out of the water), lobtails (slaps its tail flukes against the surface) and pec slaps (slaps its flippers against the surface) more often than the other Rorquals. Such energetic activity not only attracts attention but also makes the Humpback appear, as Melville said, "the most gamesome and light-hearted of all the whales." The humpback, like most other Rorquals, annually migrates thousands of miles from its polar feeding grounds in the summer to its tropical breeding grounds in the winter. Most of those we see in the Virgins spend their summers feeding in the waters around Greenland and Iceland and then voyage to the West Indies to breed. While I have spotted migrating whales as early as November and as late as May, February and March are the peak months for Alaska or California, the Virgins may feature the most relaxed and enjoyable whale watching in the world. What could be relaxing than days spent sailing, snorkeling and whale watching in the Islands? What could be more enjoyable than on-deck, sunset dinning and evenings spent under the stars in the world's most beautiful harbors ? JACK FEIERSEN |
