Whale Watching Day Sydney 20/09/2012

Since the Whale Watching boat was scheduled to leave at 1.15pm, I didn’t really want to do anything that would take me away from the city, so I spent my morning strolling through the streets, without getting lost this time. I went back to the Rum Hospital and the street they used in Matrix, the old Post Office building, which is huge by the way. After that it was back to Circular Quay. I got some cash and had an early lunch to prevent motion sickness, and then I just walked around the Quay and sat in the sun for a while.

The boat left almost on time, there were a number of researchers and a professional photographer on board of this one. We got an entertaining life vest demonstration and then we were good to go. Though they opened up the top deck while we were driving out of the harbor, it was almost impossible to be up there because it was so windy. You were able to lay back against the wind without falling down. So after taking a couple of photos of the coastline, I went back to the lower level for a bit. The plan was to drive out some twenty minutes to four Humpback whales they had found earlier that day. Once again, the plan didn’t work out but lucky for me, this time fate was particularly generous. We had hardly left the heads behind when we spotted the first “fountain” of a whale exhaling. The researchers were super excited, because nobody had seen this whale before, nobody knew what it was etc. Around the same time, they noticed mass amounts of krill in the water, which is very uncommon in this area. Underneath the krill, there were apparently also lots of fish, which I wasn’t able to see because I don’t have polarized sunglasses. But never mind. From that first sighting on, we followed the whale back and forth along the coast, he wasn’t following a set pattern like they do when they travel, so the researchers reckoned he was feeding on the krill. They were also certain very early on that it was not a humpback and each time the whale got up again after a dive, their photographer took as many pictures as possible so that they could make an identification on what kind of whale it was. And sure enough, the third or fourth time he came up, they were certain that it was a blue whale.

The researcher who did the commentary was losing it. He was so excited and fangirling all over the place. First of all, because seeing a blue whale was on his “Things to do before I die” list. And then because the last Blue whale had been spotted off the Sydney coast some fifteen years ago. It was the first time ever that a Blue whale had come this close to the coast, they usually stay out in the open sea. And when the last one was seen, it was by researchers in a small, fast vessel really far out. So for a whale watching tour boat to just stumble upon a blue whale ten minutes into the trip was about as unusual as it gets. We spent the next three hours following him around and were soon joined by two news choppers who were hovering above the boat, trying to get news footage of the whale. We got nice and close a couple of times and I was able to get a decent photo once, but I soon decided to spend the money on the photographers CD after the trip and watch the whale rather than trying to get photos of it. The whale didn’t do anything spectacular, he didn’t jump or check out the boat, probably because he was busy feeding. But still, it was a once in a lifetime experience. In the process of trying to keep up with the whale, we also saw an albatross and blackbirds that had come all the way from Siberia.

On our way back, I finally had time to go to the main deck and enjoy the free biscuits, which was life saving in a way because of my early lunch. We also got to check out the photographer’s pictures on a big screen and they were heaps better than anything I could have done, so I bought the CD with some 40-50 photos. I was so cold after the trip that I just went back to the hostel, looked at the photos and took a very, very hot shower. Didn’t help much, the cough and cold are back, but it was worth it in the end.