It was a small luxury but they really appreciated it and everyone was excited to get out on the water and see the blue whales that our friend René had seen a few days earlier.
As mentioned earlier, René has a knack for photographing and recognizing known individuals. What was exciting was that he didn't recognize one of the Blue Whales.
He wanted Richard Sears to confirm that it was a new uncatalogued animal.
Now we just had to find it. Wind and weather conditions needed to improve just a bit. We had a fog problem. There was a lot of discussion about whether or not we should even leave the marina.
I let the experts confer while I quietly stood by sweating in my giant red exposure suit of whale watching. They warned me that it would be bumpy and much, much colder out on the St-Lawrence river.
They knew by my expression that I didn't care and hadn't complained so far about anything else. Mr. Sears gave the crew members a special pre-game briefing. He reminded them of all of his hand signals and that when he needed acceleration there could be no delay. Finally, I was admonished to stay in my designated seat at all times.
They couldn't risk missing a chance to tag an animal because I rocked the boat while moving around. He said "Even if the whale is doing something weird, even if you want to take a photo, even if a spaceship lowers four tap-dancing unicorns onto the surface of the water....DO NOT MOVE."
Sir, yes, Sir!
And thus began our quest in Rimouski.
As soon as the RHIB made it out of the protected harbour, we felt the wind. The good news was that it was redirecting the fog away from us but the bad news was that at speed, the waves made the boat pitch and heave a lot.
Thankfully, we were all experienced boaters and none of us suffered from seasickness. The thing that none of us wanted was to hurt our backs. We all knew to watch the oncoming crests and slightly stand to take the dip of the trough with our knees rather than slam our tailbones every time. We looked like football fans in a stadium doing the wave.
It was also helpful to have Captain Maniac colour comment his skippering. "Oh, it's a NASTY!" he would say to welcome a particularly treacherous undulation.
We had five pairs of eyes spotting in all directions and we crisscrossed between the north and south shores of the river for several hours to no avail. We saw nothin' but mutton. (In French, the word for whitecap is "mouton", literally sheep.)
When the wind let up, we stayed in neutral hoping to hear something and looked around using our binoculars but the whales were not showing themselves.
It was then that we observed some strange behaviour between a Parasitic Jaeger and a Kittiwake. The Kittiwake had a fish in its bill and the Jaeger chased it in an aerial dogfight.
When the Jaeger successfully stole the fish, it didn't even eat it. It just continued to fly around bugging the Kittiwake with the fish still hanging out of his beak and he eventually dropped it into the water.
According to everyone on board this was very unusual. See René Roy's photographic montage here.
We chatted while looking and we all shared fun stories about previous trips. I asked a lot questions and learned so much that the day was still a great experience for me. It was just so disappointing for the researchers after all of their efforts.
We made the best of it, enjoyed our giant French wheel of cheese, confirmed that there were NO BANANAS ON THE BOAT (very bad luck according to my fisherman father!), teased René Roy about his invisible whales, Captain Sears had a nap and then we saw the only truly remarkable thing in a whole 10 hours on the water.
A few hundred metres away, a very large group of Beluga whales swam together. If we saw twenty, you could bet that there were twenty more. The species is highly endangered, it is estimated that there are only 300 or so of these mammals left in the St-Lawrence. (photo credit to Florine Martineau)
As the sun began to lower in the sky we were finally blessed with dead calm and we cut the motor completely. We just let the boat drift. There were still a few Belugas porpoising but according to house rules, I wasn't allowed to point them out.
Pointing is for Blue Whales only!
Ah, such is life. There was nothing to point at so we just went back to the marina and pulled the boat out, hitched it to the trailer and let René take it home.
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