MICS-Blue Whale study trip-September 9th 2018

MICS has me set up in a motel overlooking the Baie de Gaspé. It is very comfortable and is only a few metres away from a little restaurant in one direction and a few metres away from the rented home they use as a base-station in the other.

My package includes daily breakfast and dinner at the restaurant and snacks and light lunches are prepared by the MICS team. The weather on day one was too windy to get out on the water. My guides said they would come and get me at around 9:30 am so I woke up at 6 am with nothing to do but enjoy my surroundings and wait for the restaurant to open at 8 o'clock.

The temperature had dropped to 3 degrees overnight! What a difference from muggy Montreal's tropical urban heat bubble. I used all of my thermal layers and ventured out with my binoculars to scope the bay for morning critters. There was a beautiful eagle soaring above and some curious and playful seals swimming beyond the beach below the escarpment where I stood.

A monstrous cruise ship came closer and closer but it was going slowly so I'm sure it posed no threat to the whales in the area.

Bertrand and Florine took me to Forillon National Park and showed me their two best areas to look out for whale spouts and get an idea of where they are feeding. We saw a few little poofs of vapour, likely from smaller whales such as Minke or Humpback but with the whitecaps and the sea-birds plunge-splashing into the sea, it was a slow-go. Besides, we already knew that the Blues weren't around the park, none had been sighted in over a week...they made their way down the Saint-Lawrence river to a place called Rimouski.

Not to be discouraged, we walked in the park on an old road, no longer maintained and slowly becoming overgrown with weeds and littered with gravel, mud and fallen rocks and branches. It reminded me of the opening scenes of the film I am Legend.

 

We observed bear scat, deer tracks and claw marks up a tree likely made by a ferocious porcupine or a gangly bearcub. (All photo credits to Florine Martineau, merci!)

We regrouped at the base-station for lunch where I met the team leader and founder of MICS, Richard Sears and his wife, Evelyne. Mr. Sears is the kind of guy that I love, an obsessed maniac, passionate, dedicated to his work and almost bipolar in his mood swings from pissed off to ecstatic. It's not the swing that makes me love that kind of person it's the source of the swing. It takes the mistreatment of his beloved whales to enrage him, it takes the mere sight of a distant spout to tickle him to delirium.

Mr. Sears calls out to bears in their own tongue and squeals at seals and berates tourists for talking to gulls who might shit on our boat and giggles at old Jim Gaffigan routines playing out in his head.

A half-French, half-American hippie-sailor maniac. More to follow on this point.

Needless to say, I'm among great friends.