The island's growing popularity was made manifest by the number of boats cruising the coasts and the cars coasting the cruisers. Underwater, my peace-place remains unchanged. I escaped there to my favourite sites as I have done since 2002 but soon returned home to the grind of métro-boulot-dodo.
Working hard and never quite feeling like everything was getting done right weighed on me heavily. I didn't take time off because I felt like it would me set me back. My superiors at work had new projects for me and evaluated that it would take another pair of hands to get it all done in a reasonable time-frame. What a relief! Sure, it took some time to find the right candidate and train them but having a supporting team-member was like a pony-bottle of air to a scuba-diver. I finally had that sense of security that there was a fail-safe if I took some extended time off. With gratitude, it was time to plot my next salt-water infusion.
Sri Lanka. Blue Whales. January 2018. Exotic. Far away in time and space but a life-long dream to see and swim with them. I did my research, was tentatively booked and was just waiting for details to pay a deposit. When the tour provider came back with the sad news that the trip was cancelled due to the local authorities withholding permits to swim with the Belles Grandes Bleues, it was a great disappointment.
The last sentence of the email read:
We have also been working on tours to swim with the Orca in Norway. We are not quite ready to launch this yet but wondering if you would be interested?
Toothy cetaceans. Big toothy cetaceans. I needed to do some research. One of the first pieces of information that I gleaned was that although these apex predators are killers of fish, whales, penguins and pinnipeds, they pose virtually no threat to humans in the wild.
Then I started researching about the region in Norway where the proposed trip might take place. Topographically, some places near my home in Quebec are very much like Norway. We also have deep fjords carved by glaciers. Our estuaries and river systems mix salt water with fresh and are nurseries for countless kinds of fish which is also what makes it such a rich feeding ground for many whale species including Blue Whales.
D'oh!
This dingle-berry hadn't even considered visiting the Blues in her own damn backyard.
Fortuitously, I was offered the use of a car for three weeks in June so I considered doing a road-trip to Tadoussac and Baie-Sainte-Catherine, two towns flanking the place where the Saguenay and the Saint-Lawrence rivers meet. This region is a mecca for whale-watchers except for dumb Montrealers who routinely travel to places like Alaska and Japan and Tonga for their fix.
And now NORWAY. I put my deposit in and began the slow travel fore-play of planning that to me is just as much fun as the climactic orgasm of a departure lounge.
