Hunting with the whale
A Rorqual encounter in mid Atlantic
I was 500 miles off Portugal, five days and nights at sea, alone in my little boat, another 500 miles and five days to go before I reached my destination of the Azores, when this whale turned up. He wasn't there to amuse me. He was there to do business. I thought he would be gone in five minutes, like most of the others. He was out there with me for an hour. I would have started filming sooner if I had known.
I have sailed offshore with bigger whales than this and felt more threatened by their ability to overturn my boat without even feeling it. I once had a close encounter with orcas which in retrospect was a lot more dangerous than this rorqual. Years ago, heading from the Canaries to Senegal, a larger-than-usual dolphin broke surface two boat-lengths away and then again one boat-length off our stern. It was massive and had the distinctive black and white pattern of an orca, the killer whale. It resurfaced fifty yards away moving away to join two more orcas 500 yards ahead. We couldn’t catch them. The last we saw were the three creatures rising high as though to take a big breath of air, then they stood on their heads and were gone. I didn’t realise that we had had a close escape until we reached Dakar and met a French sailor whose boat lost its rudder to a killer whale attack right where we saw ours; we were told a pod of bad orcas was always there and always looking for trouble. An orca, a toothed whale, is a dolphin. So a fun loving dolphin just happens to be the APEX predator of the ocean.
I have never had a whale swim with me for as long as this or while so determinedly going about its own business.
This whale was hunting for small fish. I had been sailing a sea full of shoals of tiny silver fish and the whale seemed to be rounding these up into a bigger shoal so that he could scoop them up by the ton load in a single lunge. This is what rorquals do. To gather his shoal he would swim several hundred metres off to starboard and plough up and down for a while, then disappear and surface again several hundred metres off to port and plough up and down there for a while. In between the many trips he made between port and starboard he also appeared frighteningly close to my bow, either diving or surfacing only feet away, and he made one charge straight at my stern from about 50 metres away. I say “charge” only because that is what it looked like from the cockpit. I don’t think he had any of the intention to attack or be unpleasant to me that charge implies in, say, cavalry charge or, worse, bank charge.
I say “he” for no better reason than he was clearly alone and small enough to be a juvenile. Young male whales usually leave home to make their way in the world. Of course, if he was a Minke whale, as he probably wasn't, he might be a fully grown adult and I would be insulting him to say he was a juvenile.
I say he was small only because at some of the times he surfaced I could estimate the distance from his nose to his dorsal fin to be no more than 20 feet. I never got a good look at his tail but if the dorsal fin was two thirds along his back then his full length would be less than 30 feet and that makes him a bit smaller than my boat. Which is what I figured he was. Small, but not trivial.
I was lucky. Other roquals can be very big indeed. The blue whale can be one hundred feet long (120 tonnes and more) and the fin whale eighty feet long (up to 80 tonnes) or the humpback, whose massively impressive tail slap I have been close to when we sailed in the Caribbean, can be sixty feel long and weigh 40 tonnes.
I was lucky. I got a slender, streamlined youth of perhaps five to nine tonnes who wasn’t suffering from a violent rush of hormones that day.
This youth had a confusing ability to change nose shape, which confused me into thinking there were two whales out there. Rorquals, a baleen whale, take their prey by gathering it into increasingly large balls of krill or fish and then opening their huge mouth and lunging through the shoal. When the whale does this "lunge-feeding" the shape of its snout changes: the lower jaw drops from view and the upper jaw seems to be several feet shorter. I thought there was a long and a short whale out there until I realised I was watching lunge feeding,
Lunge feeding is an impressive sight. The roqual stays on the surface longer than previously, going much faster to build enough speed to open its mouth agape. The wide angle of the gaping jaw is made even wider by the water pressure and the sudden opening of it causes suction helpful to the hunter. Fish and water are swept in and the water filtered out.
I saw several lunges. The more I saw the more I realised this whale was fishing and not in the least interested in me. Even so, I was quite pleased when we at last sailed out of his hunting ground after an hour and I didn’t have to wonder if he might accidentally surface underneath me.
It is a rare privilege for a sailor in a little boat to be with wild whales in their own ocean environment, on their own terms, but it can set the heart racing.
I have sailed offshore with bigger whales than this and felt more threatened by their ability to overturn my boat without even feeling it. I once had a close encounter with orcas which in retrospect was a lot more dangerous than this rorqual. Years ago, heading from the Canaries to Senegal, a larger-than-usual dolphin broke surface two boat-lengths away and then again one boat-length off our stern. It was massive and had the distinctive black and white pattern of an orca, the killer whale. It resurfaced fifty yards away moving away to join two more orcas 500 yards ahead. We couldn’t catch them. The last we saw were the three creatures rising high as though to take a big breath of air, then they stood on their heads and were gone. I didn’t realise that we had had a close escape until we reached Dakar and met a French sailor whose boat lost its rudder to a killer whale attack right where we saw ours; we were told a pod of bad orcas was always there and always looking for trouble. An orca, a toothed whale, is a dolphin. So a fun loving dolphin just happens to be the APEX predator of the ocean.
I have never had a whale swim with me for as long as this or while so determinedly going about its own business.
This whale was hunting for small fish. I had been sailing a sea full of shoals of tiny silver fish and the whale seemed to be rounding these up into a bigger shoal so that he could scoop them up by the ton load in a single lunge. This is what rorquals do. To gather his shoal he would swim several hundred metres off to starboard and plough up and down for a while, then disappear and surface again several hundred metres off to port and plough up and down there for a while. In between the many trips he made between port and starboard he also appeared frighteningly close to my bow, either diving or surfacing only feet away, and he made one charge straight at my stern from about 50 metres away. I say “charge” only because that is what it looked like from the cockpit. I don’t think he had any of the intention to attack or be unpleasant to me that charge implies in, say, cavalry charge or, worse, bank charge.
I say “he” for no better reason than he was clearly alone and small enough to be a juvenile. Young male whales usually leave home to make their way in the world. Of course, if he was a Minke whale, as he probably wasn't, he might be a fully grown adult and I would be insulting him to say he was a juvenile.
I say he was small only because at some of the times he surfaced I could estimate the distance from his nose to his dorsal fin to be no more than 20 feet. I never got a good look at his tail but if the dorsal fin was two thirds along his back then his full length would be less than 30 feet and that makes him a bit smaller than my boat. Which is what I figured he was. Small, but not trivial.
I was lucky. Other roquals can be very big indeed. The blue whale can be one hundred feet long (120 tonnes and more) and the fin whale eighty feet long (up to 80 tonnes) or the humpback, whose massively impressive tail slap I have been close to when we sailed in the Caribbean, can be sixty feel long and weigh 40 tonnes.
I was lucky. I got a slender, streamlined youth of perhaps five to nine tonnes who wasn’t suffering from a violent rush of hormones that day.
This youth had a confusing ability to change nose shape, which confused me into thinking there were two whales out there. Rorquals, a baleen whale, take their prey by gathering it into increasingly large balls of krill or fish and then opening their huge mouth and lunging through the shoal. When the whale does this "lunge-feeding" the shape of its snout changes: the lower jaw drops from view and the upper jaw seems to be several feet shorter. I thought there was a long and a short whale out there until I realised I was watching lunge feeding,
Lunge feeding is an impressive sight. The roqual stays on the surface longer than previously, going much faster to build enough speed to open its mouth agape. The wide angle of the gaping jaw is made even wider by the water pressure and the sudden opening of it causes suction helpful to the hunter. Fish and water are swept in and the water filtered out.
I saw several lunges. The more I saw the more I realised this whale was fishing and not in the least interested in me. Even so, I was quite pleased when we at last sailed out of his hunting ground after an hour and I didn’t have to wonder if he might accidentally surface underneath me.
It is a rare privilege for a sailor in a little boat to be with wild whales in their own ocean environment, on their own terms, but it can set the heart racing.
