From March 21, 1990.
What is that noise?! Huh? What the hell? The alarm clock. Must find it. Quick. Make it stop. Try to make out the little glowing numbers. 5:30. You can not be serious. A.M.? In the morning?
Well, at least I can be confident the rest of the day has got to get better.
I was looking forward to whale watching. I really was. They said, be there by nine and various estimates suggested three hours would be plenty of travel time. Especially the way I drive.
The quite polite state trooper said the ticket was for one-hundred-and-seventy dollars ($170), so I was somewhat shaken when I ever so slowly pulled into the Embarcadero Marina at Newport Bay. On the dock, Scott Greacen, an environmentalist with the Oregon Natural Resources Council, hadn’t begun his briefing.
I was early.
Despite the long drive, inclement weather and rough seas, two dozen men and women had come to share in the Wild Oregon Ventures Whale Watch program. Cost is $20. Cruises leave twice daily on weekends through mid-April.
The air was crisp with excitement, as we listen to experts tell us that whales in their present form are ten million (10,000,000) years old. Which means they are nearly as perfect as they can be, evolution-wise. They’re very good at being whales.
We’ll be watching today for the Pacific Coast Gray, which stays in fairly shallow water, in depths of one-fifty to three hundred feet. This time of year they’re migrating north past Oregon on their way to Alaska. Usually no more than three miles off shore. As many as eighteen thousand of these great creatures pass by, heading home after a winter of Baja.
They travel about three miles per hour, half the speed at which they head south. We don’t know what the rush is then, although pregnant females are the first to leave. Apparently, they want to get the birthing over with. Understandably, as the newborn are fifteen feet long.
In the warm waters south, the youngsters feed on their mothers’ milk, which is fifteen percent fat. The baby whales gain seventy pounds or more daily while nursing.
We are reminded gray whales are warm-blooded mammals who breathe air. Just like us.
Climb aboard a forty-two-foot fishing boat, the Riptide. A hail storm forces us under cover and we amuse ourselves watching seals amuse themselves in the bay. As we reach open seas, the sky clears. I position myself at the railing of the bow, which I grip with two gloved hands. Two hands, because we’re forging into eight- or ten-foot swells.
The boat smashes through the waves as they crash toward shore. One lifts higher than the rest and my canvas sneakers and cotton socks are soaked. Scott suggests I might have been wiser to wear rubberized boots. I suggest something to Scott he doesn’t hear.
It’s like you’d imagine it feels to sit atop a bucking bronco. Up and down, up and down. Relentlessly. Tossed side to side. Never a moment to relax completely. Exhilarating.
I feel like a little boy.
“Do you see any yet?,” the mother of three asks me. It’s her first boat ride and she’s been awake since four yesterday afternoon.
“We may not see any,” I remind her. That happens.
“It doesn’t matter,” she replies, without taking her eyes off the water. “It’s just so much fun.”
Soon enough, I spotted a a telltale blow one hundred yards in front of us. An adult gray whale shoots its exhalation up to twelve feet in the air.
The captain headed straight for the creature as the hunt was on.
“Thar she blows!” Someone actually said that. The whales were off the port side, off starboard, off the stern, which is nautical talk for all around us.
“We are among them,” Scott intoned in the earnest voice of a young man awed by nature’s grandeur. He loves his planet.
For the next hour, we turned and chased and followed one whale after another. You’d think they’d be easier to spot, since they can be as long as fifty feet and as heavy as forty-five tons. Bigger than a retired Californian’s RV.
Unlike retired Californians, the whales seem unaware of their responsibility to entertain us. I have after all spent twenty bucks.
Some part of me had been expecting these leviathans to levitate above the waves. But, not a chance, mackerel breath. A blow here, a dorsal fin there. A tail fluke.
Suddenly!!! Like some B-movie monster, a gray lifted up for air RIGHT NEXT TO THE BOAT. He was close. Real close. I could actually look down his spout and see nose hairs. It really did look like a nose, with two nostrils atop the animal’s head. That was as close as I’d ever want to get.
Close. Real close.
Any closer, I’d have been riding it.
I knew I’d never see another gray whale more clearly and I realized how tired I was from the search and all that bouncing.
I staggered into the cabin to rest.
The place was full of green faces, solemn and nauseous. They were using what little energy they still had to argue about the size of the swells and how much more Dramamine they’d take the next time, only they all agreed there’d be no next time.
They decided the color of my cheeks was more lime than emerald.
Tried to concentrate on a fixed point on land, but a wave rose up to blot out the horizon.
I was never so glad to stand on terra firma.
Now that I’m back in port…. I’d do it again. I’d sleep in, I’d drive slowly and I’d catch the one o’clock.