A whaley good time

Marine encounters, non-encounters, and a rather cold swim

There’s a passage in the book Phosphorescence that always makes me smile, when Julia Baird writes somewhat grumpily about a momentous event experienced by her Sydney swim group:

One day, a whale glided into the bay and played with the swimmers for an hour – though I refuse to talk about it because I wasn’t there. (I had to read about it instead, in the Daily Telegraph, under the headline ‘A whale of a day’.) My atheist friends who were there described it as like a prayer or quasi-religious experience; their faces turned solemn at the recollection. Okay, whatever.

I think most swimmers can relate to this, even if they haven’t missed out on something quite so gargantuan. For example, I missed the morning swim with the playful fur seal. I slept through the Matariki swim with the intense red-gold sunrise, as the dawn swimmers’ glowing, torch-lit tow floats glided behind them like fireflies through the black sea (I can describe it because a video was posted to Facebook). Last summer I drove around the coast with my camera, always just missing the orcas as people exited the beach, beaming over their close encounter with nature, using superlatives like “magnificent” and “magical”. Orcas sometimes come into the harbour and get very close to shore to sweep the seafloor for stingrays, so they came within metres of surprised and delighted beachgoers.

I do not begrudge these people, and I definitely I do not wish to be swimming out in the harbour and encounter orcas (they don’t attack humans in the wild – yet – but they do attack boats and they are an apex predator, after all); I’m also not yearning to meet a shark or leopard seal face-to-face. I simply wish to have an unconstructed ‘moment’, either on shore or very very close to it, with a friendly marine creature.

It wasn’t quite unconstructed, but I did have a special time this week visiting the southern right whale that came into the harbour. These whales migrate north during winter from Antarctica to the subantarctic, and sometimes a bit further to New Zealand. They used to be so common in Wellington that residents in 1840 complained about the noise. That was before they were almost wiped out entirely by whaling ships; their baleen was coveted for corsets, riding crops and umbrella rods, while their oil was used for street and house lighting in Victorian England. (They were called ‘right whales’ because they were the best whales to hunt: they move slowly and enter bays and harbours, so were prime targets.) The southern right whale is easily identifiable by its white bumps or callosities.

Above is my photo of the whale near the ‘windy Wellington’ sign by the airport (part of the sign has been turned into a football for the FIFA World Cup) and below is a much better photo from Wikipedia of a southern right whale in Port Ross, Auckland Islands (subantarctic) where they give birth during the winter.

We last had a southern right whale visit for a week about five years ago, nicknamed Matariki because he visited during the Māori New Year. One of my favourite parts of these mammalian visits is the excited crowds that flock to see them. While most of us take average photos on our phones, everyone gets chatting and a real sense of community pervades. Photos and videos are shared via a Facebook page called ‘Whale and dolphin watch’. I didn’t make it back yesterday but the whale was quite chatty and made a big noise (like a groan; I don’t know the technical term, but it’s one of the sounds they make).

The whale watch page can be a double-pronged sword. On the one hand, it provides a public service by notifying everyone there’s a visitor, people can ask questions and post location updates, and it’s also a place where the more talented photographers can share their amazing photos. But for those who can’t visit or miss out, it evokes fomo (fear of missing out) and whatever the German word is for yearning to connect with the environment instead of viewing a digital version.

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In the spirit of sharing something more ordinary, below is a photo I took on Sunday afternoon. We’d had several days of gale southerlies and rain, I hadn’t been in the sea, and I was feeling that pull familiar to cold swimmers, a yearning for the buzz.

I suggested a 4pm swim and a few people were keen. By 3:30, the rain was falling quite heavily. The air temperature read: “feels like 7°” on my weather app. A few messages buzzed: Are we still doing this?… The rain is heavy!… Maybe not…

Our dithering continued until just before 4pm, when one person texted that they were waiting at the beach and was anyone else coming? Given I’d suggested this swim, I grabbed my gear.

I took the photo below from my car window just before we got in. A concrete sky, churned-up sea, goosebump southerly. This was not a fomo swim; the weather was rubbish and there were no crowds, newspaper photographers or captivating scenery. No one was going to see this picture and think: Wish I’d been there!

And yet, it was special in its own way. The water temperature at 11.5°C was (slightly) warmer than the air. Being immersed in the cold, with the wild weather all around us, held its own kind of beauty. The three of us in the sea felt refreshed, invigorated, and a bit giddy (well, that was how I felt).

While we were in the water we spotted a man in togs further down the beach, hazy through the drizzle. He ran to the shore, threw himself into the sea, and ran out again. Mad Wellingtonians!

In fishy news…

It’s week 3 of my marine biology course and I’m learning lots. I also now have a white lab coat so feel more the part. In our last lab we even used safety glasses, syringes and gloves (we were handling a formaldehyde solution), so it’s a serious business!

Random things I’ve learned so far that I found interesting:

• Some starfish can discard an arm if they’re in danger (to avoid getting caught or as a distraction method). Not only can they regrow the lost appendage but the detached arm, if left to its own devices, can also grow into a whole new starfish!

• Female anglerfish are fertilised by dwarf parasitic males, just a few centimetres long, which attach themselves to the belly of the much larger female (see yellow arrow below). The fanged female also has an attached ‘lantern’ on her forehead that acts as a lure in the deep sea. Sweet dreams! (Photo from this article.)

• Seabirds regulate their salt intake through glands on their forehead and also excrete a lot of salt through their noses.

• Sharks have lighter skeletons than humans to help them stay buoyant.

• The wide expanse of the open sea is known as the ‘blue desert’ because there are fewer plankton, which are more common in shallow coastal waters and give the sea a green appearance from space.