Whales Doing Whale Things

–by Alma

I’m down below reading my book when Arlo looks down the companionway and yells, “Whales doing whale things!” I run up on deck, and true enough, I see spouts all around us. They’re breaching and then diving deep down, showing us their flukes, each with a distinct pattern of white and black on the underside. Suddenly we see one launch itself straight up, mouth opening around a school of fish.

A humpback whale works the perimeter of a school of herring. Other whales are below the herring, creating a net of bubbles around it.
Here, half a dozen whales emerge from the depths, mouths open to scoop up the herring they’ve herded together.

Like the last two summers here in Alaska, the three weeks that we’ve spent sailing south from Petersburg have been full of wildlife. Despite the fact that we are on a boat, we’ve seen all sorts of fascinating land animals. One day we were rowing ashore when my dad looked up and said, “that’s some sort of canine.” Just a few yards from the beach, we looked up only to realize that it was lupine. We watched the wolf for about five minutes as it walked along the shore watching us. At one point it sat down, observing us as we were it. Eventually we landed the dingy, and it ran up into the woods. Ashore, we saw many lines of tracks running up and down the beach in the hard packed sand.

The wolf walked here.

Each paw print measured five inches long, prompting us to remind each other that the bear spray we all carried worked on wolves too, should the need arise.

The stick is just over five inches long.

In addition to the wolf, we have seen bears looking for mussels along the rocky shores, we’ve seen deer, and then there was an odd one. We were walking along the beach at coronation island when we heard the most bizarre noise. It was a combination of a bark, a warbled screech, and a donkey braying, if you can imagine what that might sound like. We came to a little stream and looked up it to see two birds that resembled oversize Great Blue Herons. When they saw us they went up into the woods, continuing to make their strange call. I had never realized that there was an animal capable of making a sound like that, but there they were—Sandhill Cranes!

In addition to the land animals, we have of course seen many sea mammals. There have been otters carrying babies, Dahl’s porpoises playing under our bow, and seals that pop their heads up as we row by, as well as the magnificent whales. Despite the hundreds of whales we have seen over the years, we can still get blown away when we see them. They breach, sometimes propelling their entire body out of the water and landing in a huge splash.

This humpback breached 36 times before we stopped counting and sailed on. It was breaching about ten times each minute, and ten minutes later when we’d left it a mile behind us, we could see that it was still going strong.

The whales also work together to bubble net and pull the schools of fish tighter and tighter until they shoot straight up right in the middle, mouths open to catch the fish only to sink back down and do it again.

Here in Alaska it seems like if you just watch in any direction for long enough you’ll see something that you never could have guessed you would see. We have no idea what we’ll see as we head down through British Columbia to Puget Sound, but we expect it will be spectacular!

We’ll leave you with this awesome video Arlo took. Enjoy!

Our gymnastic whale.

Looks Like Rain

Petersburg, AK this morning.

Jason flew into Petersburg, Alaska two weeks ago, and five days ago he met Arlo and Alma and I on the wet tarmac at the Petersburg airport. The transition from our lives on land to our lives on Debonair happens physically the moment we step aboard, but it takes more time to make the mental and emotional shifts. And it takes work.

Provisioning makes a mess of things.

Although it’s been raining almost continuously since we arrived, we’ve been working in our foul weather gear and under tarps, and now Debonair’s systems are up and running, the electronics are functioning, her rig is up, and her lockers and tanks are full.

Alma, who got her first Covid vaccine shot in California, finished the job here in Alaska.
Arlo got away from the work on Debonair to check shrimp pots with new friends.

We’re getting used to the rhythms of living aboard again and we’re itching to get away. We leave Petersburg tomorrow, heading south through Wrangell Narrows toward Prince of Wales and Kuiu Islands., and, eventually, to British Columbia.

Thanks so much for reading! We’ll post more in the coming weeks. Do send any questions you have (about the boat or the place or anything else) our way.

We’ll leave you with a final image of fishermen repairing nets–a multiday process. Nobody stops for rain here.

This is a salmon seiner. You can see the nets cascading from the hydraulic winch on the boat and down the length of the dock. The near corner of the dock is weighted down by the lead weights on the nets. Each of the men on the dock is using a big net needle to repair the net.