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Oct 5, 2001-10-04
We’re in the middle of the ‘Whale Festival’, and the whales seem to be aware of it. They are performing like mad, and the flying spray from their antics can be seen all over the bay. (They perform for local visitors, but are shy in front of a foreign tourist audience)
Strangely, the population seems to my unscientific observation quite different to those we have watched in past seasons. Usually the season brings mothers and calves to our sheltered cliff-sides. They browse up and down the bay and the babies leap into the air, creating white splashes in the blue.
This year there seem to be very few babies and many, many adults. . . whether male or female only God, some inquistive seals, and they themselves, know. But they seem to be following, with some dedication, the book theory of whale-mating. They swirl around in small groups – usually just three; round and round; down and, presumably, up.
Three hu-uge whales played outside our window today. Each was much longer than the breadth of our house. The biggest looked larger than a very bulky submarine and the callosity on its nose was the size of a curled up man. They wallowed less than two whale-lengths from the end of “our” rocks. The biggest often rolled onto its back, with its flippers stretching towards the horizons and its dark tummy, several feet above the water, bearing a brilliant white patch, the length of at least three people, and shaped like a fairly accurate map of Africa. The others swam around, over and under the big one, sometimes resting their heads momentarily on its bulk, or lying under or over it.
It was a most memorable scene, especially when a seal suddenly popped out of the sea in most unchacteristic fashion, “dog-paddling” hard enough to raise its body half out of the water as it stared at the whales. The activity was so close I could see the whiskers on the seal’s face.
The whales were mating surely. . . but it did occur to me during some of the actions that it might be a major matron, with two mid-wives in attendance, about to give birth. They drifted off towards Hermanus village.
Meanwhile other groups of whales appeared to be behaving in the same way in several parts of the bay. And this duplicates something I have often observed: The whales all seem to do the same things almost simultaneously. When one jumps – as a giant one jumped from the sea three times not far from our balcony this morning – others start jumping. Or breaching.
When one bobs its tail, numbers of others do the same. When one breaches, others do it soon afterwards. . . . sometimes.
Yet nothing is predictable.
As I write, I can see the trio I described here, still wallowing about. They have returned to a position in front, of our house, but quite far out. Going onto the balcony to check the general scene, I saw them disappear below the surface
october 13. . . they are too far out to observe underwater. And all the others – except one group ruffling the surface near Kwaaiwater – have also submerged.
The pattern of simultaneous behaviour is not so precise as to warrant immediate deductions, but the tendency is worth watching.
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