OK, so 23 Days, something like 7000 miles.. how much wildlife did I see…
Well, just enough… it’s the ocean, and due to the size of the ship, you don’t just throw a line over and trawl… maybe we could have, but the odds of something jumping up under a ship that big to take a bite seem pretty miniscule, and add to it the fact that the fan tail is like a 5 minute walk from the accommodation.. it’s not like falling asleep with your hand on the tiller and tying the line to your toe… Filipinos love a good fish, and they didn’t even try, so fishing was out…
So that brings us to whales.. when he got off the Libra, someplace between the Golden Gate and the Farrilons, the Pilot for SF bay told me to look out for whales for the next few hours, it would be good watching he said..
He was right.. I don’t think any major migrations were occurring, but a couple hours later, me still soaking up my first day on board by not wanting to retire to my room until exhausted (there would be plenty of time to rest) and realizing the guys didn’t care if I grabbed the binoculars every once in a while as long as the Titanic wasn’t bearing down on us, I caught me a nice crew of Finbacks with an up close look… they were kind of trying to get out of the way of the boat, and you could see their long sleek bodies laboring to get away, swimming across the surface:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fin_whale
There must have been 4 of them, maybe 5, and I guess this was a small portion of the roaming eastern pacific population of 25-27,000.. Wiki, which knows all, says their population has doubled or more since the 70’s, so things are good, and they are a bit of a mystery still, never quite as famous as their nearer shore relatives the humpbacks, greys, rights, or the big ol blues that do roam these waters…
The guys were always watching… I noticed that two of the Filipinos, Norman and Leo, seemed to keep a sharp eye, although I might be giving credit in a kind of Lone Ranger and Tanto way, because a lot of the Romanians seemed to have a similar eye, but those two would be standing there, perhaps not even looking out to sea, and something out the window of the bridge would catch their eye, and it would be a whale.. it happened to me once if not twice… I never determined what they were, as the waves were choppy, but you would see a spout, sometimes just a mist, but these guys had been staring at the sea for so long they would spot it… One time I hung off the side of the starboard fly bridge for 20 minutes trying to see more.. we were moving fast, but I would spot a spout every 4 or 5 minutes.. in a different time, I would have said “to the boats!”, but no longer…
The biggest classic thrill was after out big lifeboat drill, maybe 2 days out, so getting far from shore, maybe 1000 miles… I decided to do my fist wander up front, maybe my second.. I hopped up on the little platform at the very prow (The ‘King of the World Spot’ for all of us who don’t read Patrick O’Brien novels, and looked down on instinct, one hand on my helmet to I don’t lose it, the other on the little metal guard rail to keep me from falling over with a little up pressure to keep me from loosing my teeth on some sudden surge).. there, way down there, were two dolphins, two toned, riding the bulbous bow… they looked small.. it was the first time I was like oh wait.. it’s a long way down… I now realize they were like 5 feet long, but again, I was 45 feet up.. I think I was amazed instantly at two things: one, that they could go that fast.. the boat was going 21 or 22 knots.. like 24 mph… and that they would go that fast, dart away, and overtake the boat to get back in position.. I am pretty sure I saw it right, and it was impressive.. the second thing was that they were out here mid ocean.. I tend to see Dolphins like people, they think like us essentially, and see their territory as the pelagic zone, close to shore.. a few weeks before I had been walking Venice Beach at sunset, and I saw one of those things: some tourists had jumped in the water, they seemed Latin or Italian (I guess that is Latin!) and a pod of dolphins decided to play with them.. literally, they were swimming with each other in the surf at sunset.. I was walking and just plopped down and watched.. everyone who could see it, about 10 people, felt a bit blessed… seeing them out here made me realize dolphins have balls in a funny way.. if they are 1000 miles out to shore, in what I see as shark territory, what can’t they do? Turns out these are deep water dolphins, according to ol wiki again, and they actually can be 8 ft long.. that’s how bit the boat is… I thought they were 3 feet long when I first looked down…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_white-sided_dolphin
Through the middle of the trip there wasn’t much wildlife… there might have been some whales gliding invisibly by, on their way from Ak to Hawaii for some well earned rest, maybe some tuna gliding round out there, but you don’t see much evidence of a food web above.. it was winter and there were big storms to the north, but the closer we got the Japan, the more I noticed birds…. I didn’t expect to.. I was noticing them around the date line and beyond… way deep in the Northern Pacific… maybe it’s the success of Fox eradication on the Aleutians, but here we were, 1000 miles out, and there are birds… You read in old sea stories how that’s a way to figure out if you are near shore, but some of these seemed like they didn’t come into shore, maybe some albatrosses, and these brown dudes,a nd grey dudes, but not being an orinthology type (can’t even spell it…) I was at a loss…
You might imagine as we got closer to Japan there wasn’t much beyond birds… The Japanese eat everything in the sea with aplumb…the furthur you get from Tokyo, the more likely you are to get something on your plate that looks like something George Lucas or Ridley Scott dreamed up., and dolphins, not so much anymore you might imagine if you have seen The Cove, all the rage these days:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mc2arU61LSg
So Flipper ain’t hanging in Japan, he’s chilling with Kurt Cobain and Philip Seymour Hoffman talking about how tough show-business is.. Off the Siberian Coast, I think nothing came in because it was such a busy port, but had I dreamed to see something, it would have been this, but no dice:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Pacific_right_whale
Anyhow, by the time you get close to Korea, and the Sea of Japan, you start to see fishing boats, and more fishing boats, and by the time you hit the East China Sea, you wonder how there can be any fish left… I could see 50 different fishing boats one night when I walked around the ship to count.. they would fill up our radar like locusts… I imagined the crew’s bouncing along, squatting and smoking, trying to make the best of the sea… doing he most awful things with that chinese smile that makes you love ’em anyways.. there were birds, and the Chian Sea is actually shallow, so I wonder that it might produce a lot of fish, but they gotta be leaving as quick as they come in with this honeybee fleet outside of every port city…
Anyhow, that’s what I got! Next trip maybe I will bring some blow-hole identifier or something, but I might have joked, it’s about the last place on earth you don’t just settle arguments, or sate your curiosity instantly, by googling questions on your iphone! 4 or 5 finbacks, 2 or 3 dolphins, and a few sea lions as we left San Fran I neglected to mention, over 23 days, and a lot of birds.. remember this line?
What did I see? I saw the sea…