HAPPY BIRTHDAY, GAIL! WISH WE WERE THERE TO HELP YOU CELEBRATE.
Day 288 – Today we did a little more than the “nothing” of yesterday. Still awaiting the high temperatures that have been forecast. It reached 75 degrees today. We did a load of laundry today; we’ll do one tomorrow, then practically everything we own will be clean. We have no idea when we’ll come across a place to do laundry again. Oh, such problems being on the road, ho ho.
We spent most of the day in the screened tent. The most exciting thing happened, and we didn’t get there in time for pictures. A very large Humpback Whale breached several times right across from us. I was inside folding laundry; great timing, right?! Rob had just gone back out to the tent – I was going to join him when I was finished. From the inside of the RV, I heard a sharp cracking or whacking sound – I thought it might be someone chopping wood. Rob, in the tent, thought it might be a gunshot. Inside, I heard it again, thinking it could be a gunshot, heaven forbid (we’re obviously from the U.S.) People were running to the shore shouting and pointing; Rob grabbed his camera and headed across the road. Another not-quite-as-loud bang and with the yelling outside, I went to the window. I didn’t see it at all. Rob did but wasn’t there in time to get the shot of a lifetime. The whale came straight out of the water head first, all the way out up to its tail – that is a lot of whale straight up in the air! The loud noise was it hitting the water as it came back down in a belly flop. This is something we may never see again; it doesn’t happen that often. Naturalists say it take a tremendous amount of energy for the whale to lift itself out of the water like that. The whale starts deep in the water gain momentum and then swims straight up. On whalewatching trips the guides have said either that they’ve never seen a breach or rarely have seen a breach. Anyway, Rob did see it and it was very exciting! Often they don’t get that much of their bodies out of the water. (We have twice seen whales come up head first but they didn’t come up much further than that – almost all the way out of the water? Rob was lucky that he got to see it.) Here are the pictures of the things we did get pictures of.
