Through The Desert, Finding Whales

Tuesday morning, March 8th, 2011. We drove out of the town of San Ignacio, heading for the San Ignacio Lagoon, on the shores of which we would stay the next two days at a Baja Adventures camp.

In other words, we were going to see whales.

To set the stage, a brief anecdote from my childhood: when I was six or seven, I stood on a bluff at Fort Ross, on the Sonoma Coast, and saw a pod of migrating whales, far out to sea. That memory has lingered with me and was a driving factor in my decision to move west from Montana. But since I moved to California, I had yet to see a whale. I did see a dolphin or two in Santa Cruz, and several otters.

To reach the camp, we drove through the Mexican desert. When I say drove, I mean we rattled and shook and slid over a rough, washboard track, full of stones and bounces, flanked by cacti and miles of empty land. We saw one Suburban going the other direction, way too fast for conditions; a white truck inching along ahead of us and then behind us as we passed, and, naturally in the middle of nowhere, a big Coca-Cola delivery truck.



We played a lot of U2 as we drove, which I thought was quite apt.

The camp was spare, but comfortable. It was a long array of wooden box-like huts spread along the shoreline. Our cabin included a full-size bed; Marina and I were both pleased that neither of us fell out of bed during the night while sleeping; it would not have been hard to do. Here's a picture of our cabin; yes, ours was the only one with the painting of a whale on the side:




A small back porch offered a commanding view of the lagoon; with binoculars, it was quite possible to see whales spouting here, there, and almost everywhere. Seriously. Everywhere. When we were out in the boats, at first, we were constantly craning our heads everyone mentioned a spout of a surfacing whale. After a few hours, though, we took it as a matter of course to have five spouts surrounding us at distance, like points on a compass.

Not that we ever became jaded.

We went on a total of four two-hour whale watching trips over the course of our stay from Tuesday to Thursday. Here we are in our adventure garb:



Imagine seeing a leviathan slowly rising through the water towards you, becoming more and more clear and tangible, a massive, thirty to forty foot long creature you've only seen at a distance or in movies. A creature you love, but that looks like it could tip your boat over like a Democrat rolling over in Congress. For instance, one mother whale gave our boat a nudge with her fluke; a tremendous bang shuddered the entire boat. To tell the story of our whale-meetings, a panoply of photos:






We saw whales breaching in the distance, silhouetted against the sun. We saw them slide straight up out of the water, hanging there vertically, nose pointed towards the sky, what used to be called "spyhopping" but is now called "head-upping", technically the more accurate term, because in most cases, their eyes aren't actually coming out of the water, which would make it hard for them to do much spying. At one point, a whale did this about two feet away from the side of the boat when we were all looking the other way, so silently that no one heard a sound. We were all a bit startled, as you might imagine. We also saw a calf roll playfully across his mother's back like a baby human will crawl all over its parents.

And then there was the moment when the whales came right up to the boat, literally scratching their back on the hull and checking us out.

There I was, watching all four other passengers--including Marina--rush to one side of the small boat to try to touch the whales as they circled us and passed under the boat, causing the boat to lurch noticeably to one side. Naturally, I thought I should slide over to the other side as a counterweight. And then I had the urge to reach out and grab Marina, but then that would look possessive. It was a dilemma, because I would hate myself if I didn't touch a whale too.

Finally, Marina urged and coaxed me over to the side of the boat, where a young whale was, wow, right there, just two feet away, and I couldn't quite reach, it was just out of reach below the surface of the lagoon, an inch or two of water between my fingers and a grey whale, and then Marina told me to lean forward a little more, and then I was touching the whale, for the briefest of moments before it was gone again, but enough to feel the cold, soft rubbery feel of the whale. And I managed not to poke it in the eye or the blowhole, so that was a plus, because apparently they don't react well when that happens.

I've never felt a rush like it. And in the evening on Wednesday, picture us bouncing over the waves at sunset, whales breaching to the left, a pair of bottlenose dolphins gracefully cutting through the waves to the right. It added a sublime element to an already amazing trip.