The Secret Life of Whales by Micheline Jenner

Author:Micheline Jenner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: NewSouth
Published: 2017-10-09T04:00:00+00:00

ANCIENT TRACKS

As the whale travels through the shifting, changing seas, a map — unlike anything used on land — is learned. The temperature changes; light changes; colours change. The volume of ocean between the surface and the sea floor changes.

Peter Warshall (1974)

I blinked and looked again, steadying my gaze. There it was. I carefully lifted my binoculars without altering my field of view and, just like clockwork, again the blow rose into the sky. It was a tall, straight blow and even before it reached its 9-metre height in the light air, the silhouette of an elongated body with an ever-so-small dorsal fin showed at the surface. I grabbed the UHF radio.

‘Curt, I’ve got a whale! It’s a really tall blow!’

Curt has graciously learned to respond quick smart when he hears this kind of statement from me. Having got his attention, I handed over the radio to Phil Bouchet, one of the two research assistants with me in the observation tower on the fly bridge on WhaleSong II. We needed a vessel with offshore capability and range for our research team to track whales in offshore regions, so in 2006 we spent five months refitting Genesis, a 24-metre tuna long-liner, which we relaunched as WhaleSong II.

I climbed down from the tower and reached for my camera. Another research assistant quickly radioed the details of the sighting to the wheelhouse where the information was entered on Logger, our computer database.We were travelling on a northward transect on the eastern side of Scott Reef, 200 nautical miles offshore. It was a lovely Kimberley day — the sea was calm, making the colours of the reef even more vibrant. Inside the reef, the water of the lagoon was bright turquoise, indicating shallow waters over the sandy bottom. The orange-brown of the exposed coral at the southern end of the reef was also surrounded on its outer edge by a glowing thin turquoise line that gave way to the glorious indigo hues of the deeper ocean. This scenery on our portside was magnificent and to boot we had whales! But what sort?

In the wheelhouse, Dale Peterson, our first mate, took over the driving from Curt, who joined us on the flybridge. Counting the minutes from the first dive we made notes of the whale’s downtime, counted the blows and noted the period of the surface interval. Engaging the steering station to drive from the flybridge, Curt took the controls again and we slowly motored to where I had seen the whale at 000 degrees (a true bearing from my handheld compass) and 1.5 nautical miles away. After 10 minutes we saw another blow, and we were in the mix. After another good look through the binoculars, Curt was puzzled.

‘We’ve got a blue whale here, look at the long body. But where is it going?’

At the time of the sighting we were heading north. From the side profile of the whale, I could tell it was travelling east to west. We knew the two reefs

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