Thar She Blows!

Before today, I’d never been whale-watching.  This seems incredible since I grew up in Washington State, close to the Puget Sound where orcas swim.

It could have been Seattle today here in Southern California.  Yesterday, it was sunny.  Tomorrow, it’s supposed to be sunny.  Today?  The clouds threatened to rain.  The wind blew turning all the ungloved fingers red. It was cold.

I brought a wool hat that a blog reader knit for me.  (Best birthday gift ever, all those years ago!)  I wore the kind of gloves that look like mittens until you flip back the end and then they are fingerless gloves.

(I love her hair.)

We’d been out in the open ocean, maybe five miles from shore for an hour and fifteen minutes.  Some moms were leaning over the railing throwing up, but I was taking photos of  the shimmering sun on the waves, bummed out that we weren’t seeing any whales.

And then, the captain got all excited and told us to look at “one o’clock” and though I looked and looked, I saw nothing.

Time passed and my nose grew colder and then, suddenly, he told us the whale was at “eleven o’clock”. I couldn’t see it because I was on the wrong side of the boat.

But then.  The boat turned, the whale surfaced and I saw it!

So amazing.  Even the captain–who told us his dad built the boat we were on when the captain himself was in kindergarten–he was excited!

These were fin whales, the captain said.

And amazingly enough, not a drop of rain fell while we were on the boat.