A picture is worth a thousand words

Aug. 27 - I've decided to skip all the superlatives, as none are adequate, and let the whale photos speak for themselves. The photos don't begin to do them justice either, but they will have to do.

The long black whales are Blue Whales, the largest of all mammals. They're 75-80 feet long and eat four tons or more of food per day! They are protected and endangered; the St. Lawrence population is estimated at 60-100 and the entire North Atlantic population is probably less than 1000.

The Beluga or White Whale is also protected and endangered. Their numbers are less than 500 and declining due to environmental toxins.

Heading out into the bay this morning we watched the tour boats, and when they congregated and stopped, we knew to watch for whales if they had not already made their presence known to us. We watched Blue Whales blowing and breaching, heard them breathing and moaning. Rachael and I stood in our bowsprits, cameras clicking wildly, while Wayne and Claus kept busy trying to aim the boats to where we pointed.
The Blue Whales had disappeared and we were sitting back, relishing the experience. All of a sudden there seemed to be a lot of whitecaps on the water and my immediate thought was, "Belugas." Then I would laugh and say to myself, "Now I'm imagining that every little thing is a whale." Except they were Belugas and we were surrounded by them - over 100 for sure.
They swam past the boat, swam up to the boat, swam under the boat, and I couldn't shoot my camera fast enough. Wayne put the engine in neutral, as we understood the protocol to be. We realized we were in a marine park sanctuary when the park patrol boat interrupted our experience and set us straight: If we find ourselves in a pod of Belugas, we are supposed to leave the area immediately and stay at least 400 meters away (200 meters from Blue Whales). While they kindly educated Wayne about whale etiquette, I kept taking photos, including some of Kyanna with Rachael taking photos of the Belugas.

We saw other kinds of whales too, and quite a few seals. The seals don't photograph well; they just look like black lumps in the water.

All day long the thought kept crossing my mind: this is something I couldn’t even have dreamed about.

Dinner this evening with Claus and Rachael anchored off Île du Bic was a celebration of another kind. We bubbled with conversation about our shared experience, one of the most awesome of our lives. We had "show and tell," reliving the day as we shared our photos, oohing and ahhing as over a pile of precious gems.