Waiting for the whales (page 4)
I concede I might've become a bit hysterical gazing at the
expanse of humpback belly and a three-metre fin practically
within tickling distance. My god: the fin. The towering pectoral
stays with me for the rest of the day.
WHALE OF A TOUR
Getting there Wildland Tours'
northern whale study program
begins in Deer Lake, N.L., with
flights available from St. John's.
To visit Battle Harbour on your
own, take a ferry from Sainte
Barbe, N.L., to the Quebec village
of Blanc-Sablon. From
there, rent a car or take your own
for a two-hour drive along the
Trans-Labrador Highway to
Mary's Harbour, where you'll
catch the ferry to Battle Harbour.
Staying there Accommodations
on the tour include local inns
and hotels and are all prearranged.
In Battle Harbour,
choose from seven restored
buildings, including old cottages
and a former RCMP station. The
site is open to tourists only from
mid-June to mid-September so
book well in advance. Find listings
and make reservations at
www.battleharbour.com or call
(709) 921-6216.
Playing there
The water surrounding
northern Newfoundland
and southern Labrador is rich in
wildlife but it's also one of North
America's least-studied marine
areas. The northern whale study
is a 10-day program, with meals,
local transportation and instructional
lectures organized by
Wildland Tours. The trip takes
place in late August, with a maximum
of 12 people, so book early.
www.wildlands.com
If you choose to visit on your
own, Battle Harbour is easily
navigable on foot. Circle the
island on boardwalks, old cart
roads and footpaths while taking
in impressive ocean vistas. If you
have time, hire a boat to nearby
Caribou Island and visit the
most easterly point in continental
North America. For a taste of
history, take a two-hour guided
tour and learn about the settlement's
centuries-old past.
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After such a dramatic introduction, the next morning feels
like a bit of a letdown. We spend several cold, foggy hours puttputting
around the coast into abandoned bays and coves, with
nary a spout in sight. But just as we pull up to the dock in Battle
Harbour, looking forward to soup and the wood stove, a local
saunters up to tell us the ferry operator has spotted multiple
humpbacks in the bay.
Fifteen minutes later, we are in humpback heaven. The
baleen whales, their unfathomable mouths filtering caplin and
herring, seem inescapably so much more benign and, yes,
cuddly than the toothy, dolphin-chomping orcas. Perhaps one of the caplin undergoing mass slaughter far beneath
the surface would disagree, but we jolly tourists don't witness
any of that. All we see are humpbacks lolling and lazily
diving. They seem to indulge in more overtly playful antics
than orcas. As we watch from a distance, one whale performs
what Snow calls a headstand, the full bottom half of
its 36-tonne body jutting directly out of the water. Pods of dolphins cavort with impunity, fin to fin with the whales in
the hopes of scoring some stray caplin.
As humpbacks and dolphins dive and leap around us (pah!,
go the dolphins' blowholes; blatt! go the humpbacks), the fog
simply blows away. The ocean shifts from seething grey to dazzling
blue. It is three hours before we return to shore. Every once
in a while, it occurs to me that I am hungry and still quite
cold, even bundled in fleece, but then, from my spot in the bow
of the boat, I look directly down into the water and witness a
rolling expanse of white pectoral emerge from somewhere
beneath our boat. My heart pounds, my blood pumps, my voice
shrieks: "It's coming up right in front of us!” And next thing I
know, it does, with a tremendous, trumpeting blatt! All my
yearned-for creature comforts are forgotten in that moment, blatted
into the background as humpbacks lunge and circle, their
iconic, barnacled tails hovering above the waves. The hard coast
falls away - I fall in moony, swooning love.
Lynn Coady is the author of the novels Mean Boy and Saints of Big
Harbour. She lives in Toronto. Ned Pratt is a photographer in St. John's.
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