Birthday Weekend. Part Three - Whales!

    Sunday was full of whales.
    Six of them, to be exact: Six gigantic, truly magnificent sperm whales that fair took my breath away as I watched them swimming on the surface and then, filling their huge lungs with air, diving straight down into an ocean trench nearly 2,000 feet deep.
    My late father spent much of his life on water dredging harbors and doing whatever else his company did when it sent him all around the U.S. and the world. Perhaps because I am his oldest child and was, therefore, destined from birth to be his polar opposite, I have spent most of my life on the land. He was in the Coast Guard in World War II. I was in the infantry in Vietnam. He could swim like a fish. I can swim but not far and not well. To me, the beach is for reading and maybe some shallow-water snorkeling, but swimming out a half mile and then back again, as he used to do on those rare times when we were at the beach together, is not something I've done or ever intend to do.
    Because he spent so much of his life on the water, whales were no big deal to him. He'd seen them often but seldom talked about them as being anything but a hazard to navigation. To me, however, whales have always been something very special. Perhaps that's because they live in an environment that is so alien to my own or maybe it's just because they are so huge. I don't know why I've always found them so fascinating but I have and so when Elena said she was going to take me on a whale watching tour for my birthday I was excited at the prospect of finally seeing them up close. I was also, I confess, a little anxious. They have always been so mysterious as well as fascinating and I wondered if, maybe, by getting close to them some of the magic might wear off.
    It did not.
    We went out on the tour a little after 11 a.m. Sunday and the operators were careful to point out that we might see only one whale during our two-plus hours on the water. That didn't disappoint me; seeing one would have been plenty, especially if we could get reasonably close to it.
    We saw our first whale about 20 minutes into the trip; a long black shape lying mostly submerged about 200 yards away. It spouted water and swam lazily forward as we approached it, seemingly unconcerned by our presence, which I found pretty remarkable given our very long history of slaughtering his kind. We drew closer and the captain slowed his engines so that we were riding easily on the flat ocean as we kept pace with the whale's progress. He spouted more water into the air and the tour guide told us that the whale was expanding its lungs prior to making a dive. We watched in fascination as he did this three more times and then, in an act of supreme gracefulness, tipped his head down and dove; his massive flukes standing high in the air for a few quick seconds before they disappeared below the surface with only a small ripple to mark his progress.
    I meant to take a photo of that dive but I admit that I was unable to do so; it was such a beautiful sight that I never managed to do anything but stare.
    It wasn't long before we sighted our second sperm whale, another long black shape riding easily on the surface. We drew close to it and then watched as it went through the same ritual of gradually expanding its lungs for a deep dive. As the first one had, when it was ready its massive body tipped headfirst, its tail went high in the air then disappeared beneath the small waves and it was gone.
    I did manage to get some photos of this dive, and of two more whales diving but by the time we saw our fifth and sixth whales I was content to just watch them. It occurred to me that it would be wonderful to swim with them even though I am no swimmer but I dismissed that idea almost as quickly as it came. The sea is their world, not mine, and I think I would feel like a trespasser skulking through someone's back yard in the dead of night were I to jump into deep water just to be near them.
    Later, back on shore, I compared photos with Elena, Josep and his cousin Elena. Theirs were better than mine and they'd even shot videos of the whales diving.
    Very cool but not for me. I have a few photos but, more than that, I have the memory of that first dive and it is better than my pictures.

This was the second sperm whale we saw; I was so awestruck by the first one I saw diving that I couldn't do anything but stare and so I didn't get a photo of it.

This is the view from the front of our motel in Kaikoura.

Sperm whale spouting as it went through the process of expanding its lungs prior to making a deep dive.

The moon coming up in Picton just as the sun was going down behind a mountain in the west.