The visitor

I fumbled out of the cool, dark cabin and into the humid starlight.

‘Poof’. I heard the whale’s blow almost immediately. She was on the leeward side of our poop deck, riding our wake. Her pale shadow rippled at the surface, maintaining a near-constant speed with no clear beatings of her broad fluke. Every two or three minutes, her sharp rostrum broke the barrier between wave and wind to exchange humid, fishy breath for the Atlantic’s finest midnight air. There were familiar shadows around, but with most in their bunks, the deck was quiet. We watched as her blowhole slipped into the deep and- for a brief second- a rubbery dorsal fin appeared. 

Of course, the question of her species was inevitable. A chance to recognise another and call them by their name. I took mental notes of key features; her length- maybe six meters; head shape- forming a smooth point; dorsal fin- falcate. She wore the shape of a baleen (Mysticeti) whale but was slight for even the smallest of the giants. My mind was torn between the desire to categorise scientifically, to call a creature by her name, and the need to experience the poetry of the encounter. Sparks of bioluminescence plumed from turbulence that even her sleek body sliced into the water, and I was lost in the art of it. One mammal by another, separated by sixty-six million years of evolution and the hull of a centurian ship, dense steel pulled from the earthiest places and set afloat on the wateriest of them. We drink the same air through the same lungs, suck milk when young, birth live offspring. We both love the salt of the sea. Why else would your wolf-like ancestor have wondered into seafoam, or we sailors be in a place for which humans are so ill-adapted?

At one point, she came tight alongside Europa’s steely hull, then rolled sideways outboard, exposing her pale underside. Not long after this, and with no break in the rhythm of her dance, the whale was gone. We waited a further twenty minutes before peeling back to routine. I made brief notes on the encounter before stumbling back to a world of slumber.

The next morning, I turned to the library in search of answers. Cross referencing various field identification guides landed our sleek sister on the likelihood of the minke (Balaenoptera) whales. Lacking evidence of the clear, white band on the upper side of a common or dwarf (B. acutorostrata) minkes flippers, I wondered if she was an Antarctic minke (B. bonaerensis). Possibly far north in her species range for the season, and her markings having been shrouded in the night, I decided not to make the distinction of species. 

While pondering her scientific category, the call mariners have been making for centuries cut through the morning air. ‘Whale! Eleven o’clock!’.

Was it our same friend from the previous night? Rushing to the deck, a now large group stared in disbelief as, seven or eight times, a minke whale launched her body headlong into the sky, crashing into seafoam some seven hundred meters from the ship. Was there another, slipping quietly through the surface or were the tricks of the choppy sea and rising sun getting to us?

Honoured to have experienced both the silent grace and jovial acrobatics of one of the smallest species of the largest-bodied parvorder (most specific taxonomic order) on earth, we pushed past the Brazilian coast, bound for Uruguay, curious for what the oceans would bless us with next.