Notebook: Whale-Watching / Kayaking

1.  I will have to set aside the camera a bit more deliberately to engage my whole sight and other senses.    Next time around.  The camera itself, turning it on, fussing with zooming and focusing, really narrows the experience.  I love having the shots to document and to spark memories, but I want to look and see more fully in the moment.

2.  The experience really was rooted in wet neoprene, in the seat of the wetsuit, in the motion of the swell under the kayak, in the lifting and the dropping and the shifting and the pulling and the pushing.  On the afternoon of the 30th, the tug was back into the harbor, but the swell was rising and the wind had created chop, so there was a constant motion -- up down thisway thatway-- that the morning had lacked, had been so flat and calm.  I love the water movement, and the sit-on-top is so well-crafted to ride such movements.  Even now, two days later, if I just sit and unfocus, I am moving in my mind with residual body sense-memories.  A lovely sensation to me.

3.  Then, besides the emphatic floating quality, the sounds!  So many birds flying, shrieking, calling, ker-plunking into the water after the anchovies.  Pelicans and terns and murres and cormorants and classic gulls.  Terns and pelicans out with us, mostly.  Then, the barking of sea lions in the distance, the splashing of seals nearby, the crunching-lunching of otters.  The chatter of humans: excited, agitated, inane.  "HOLY SHIT" were the first words out of one fellow's mouth, as he rounded the small point to leave the harbor only to be faced with a lunging whale.  (That fellow was off his game, more nervous than his date, and he shadowed JP and me off and on, nervously.  Still, such caution in such a situation is no bad thing, and his date may have been more water-savvy -- or simply oblivious -- than he was.)  The whales' spouting, blowing, and splashing.  Occasionally, the power station would let out great blasts of steam that would mimic the whale spouts--and would confuse me, for a moment, as I looked for that other whale.  The water made the most noise and the most noises, lapping and slapping and splashing and crashing along and onto the jetty, the kayak, the whales, itself.

Kayaking With Whales: 7/30/14

I've recently posted the most dramatic photosfrom last Wednesday's go-out from Moss Landing here, here, and here, but I want to present more shots -- less dramatic shots, mostly -- that I still will return to with awe and appreciation.  At the time I was busy paddling and observing and reacting, frankly, to the dozens of whales that kept feeding on the anchovies in the area, sharing this space with the seals, the birds, and the kayakers.  Only afterwards has it really sunk deep how special the bounty of the day really had been.  I'm fairly sure my kayak-partner, JP, has had much the same reaction.  Excitement then; awe, afterwards.

Here are some shots of those whales from the 30th, a wealth of whales.  I was using an amphibious Canon Powershot D10, which works best 8-10 feet from one's subject, underwater or in dry air, and so I missed too many shots or marred too many shots with a faulty zoom or just not enough reach, as it were, technically.  JP had a similar problem with his GoPro, that middle distance being required, and yet neither of us wanted to get too close, neither of us wanted to bother these glorious creatures.  We hung back or paddled away from any possible collisions or crowding, choosing respect over getting the shots.

The morning paddle:

Our initial view beyond the harbor mouth: what luck, a whale!

Shots from the afternoon paddle:

Postscript:
When JP and I returned a few days later with family to kayak again with the whales, we only saw three whales or, more likely, the one whale three times, and only in glimpses.  A let-down, certainly, at that time, but later that day, JP reminded me what a glory of a day we had despite not seeing the dozens of whales we'd seen on the 30th (and which I am showing evidence of with the photos below), what a glory of day we had because in the Moss Landing Harbor we paddled by and observed harbor seals, sea lions, otters by the dozen, terns, pelicans, and other rich life, beside what we saw outside the harbor as we paddled further, probably, away from land than I'd paddled before, the swell light and easy, almost flat, looking for whales, and feeling we'd missed out, even though the sea lions and the birds and even an otter or two could be found out there, you know?

Keeping Track with Humpbacks

Kayaking: Humpback Whale off Moss Landing

No zoom here, so this whale was even closer than it looks in the photo!

And I had back-paddled before taking the shot because I could see bubbles and possibly a back beneath and just in front of my kayak.

And, JP reminds me:  "And just picture how much whale there is below the surface: more than 2/3s of the humpback lies ahead of its 'hump' & its ventral fins are about the length of the tail section that's visible here."

A very special moment on a very special day:  I felt blessed.  Still do.

Watching The Boats Sail By

Visual joy: 

the view from Ferry Point.

Visual toy:

study aid, truly, to model knockdowns, whale attacks, and skulduggery;

stand-in for the Essex and, soon, for the Hispaniola.

Eye, Aye: A Medley

A Whale of a Tale

Moby: sculpture mix, unglazed.

Thanks also to the artist of the Penguin Books Deluxe Edition of Melville's Moby Dick, foreword by Nathaniel Philbrick.  Book and book cover used here with respect.

(I can't find any reference to the actual artist of the cover, so I will need to conduct an image search in the near future.)

The White Whale, Swimming

Making: Clay in Process

 Wet clay: mask.  Feeling my way here . . . .

 Seals and mermaids: clay almost dry enough for the kiln.

 Bisqued whale with drying glaze.

 Motley assortment just glazed.

Quick session just to keep my hand in, you know?

Moby, Ubiquitous

Another Moby: 
sculpture mix, unglazed.

Moby Dick!

Sperm Whale: sculpture mix; unglazed.

Hail Herman Melville and your great American epic!

To The Kiln: Creatures

Practice pieces.

Otter Pelt Short

Keeping track: buzzcut 2013.

Hydrodynamic.

S-P # 51+

Booklist: English 1A Fall 2011

Susan Casey's The Devil's Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America's Great White Sharks;

Matthew B. Crawford's Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work;

Laurence Gonzales' Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why;

Tom Kendrick's Bluewater Gold Rush: The Odyssey of a California Sea Urchin Diver;

William Langewiesche's The Outlaw Sea: A World of Freedom, Chaos, and Crime;

and

Philbrook's In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex.

Also, a good college-level dictionary.

Plus selected essays and chapters from Ebbesmeyer & Scigliano, Whitty, Wells, Steinbeck, and others as well as selected videos on sharks, marine mammals, abalone and urchin diving, and related local material. (Perhaps Steinbeck and Hemingway on writing too.)

Summer planning will be fun.

P.S. All those subtitles look a bit daunting, don't they? Or, those subtitles combine with the titles to draw you in, draw you closer!

Here's the list again, but just with the basic titles:

The Devil's Teeth

Shop Class as Soulcraft

Deep Survival

Bluewater Gold Rush

The Outlaw Sea

In the Heart of the Sea

Passages: Melville's Practical Tattooing

Consider these words from Ishmael, the narrator of Herman Melville's classic Moby-Dick:

"The skeleton dimension I shall now proceed to set down are copied verbatim from my right arm, where I had been tattooed; as in my wild wanderings at that period, there was no other secure way of preserving such valuable statistics. But as I was crowded for space, and wished the other parts of my body to remain a blank page for a poem I was then composing--at least, what untattooed parts might remain--I did not trouble myself with the odd inches; nor, indeed, should inches at all enter into a congenial admeasurement of the whale."

This passage may be found at the end of Chapter CII: A Bower in the Arsacides, just before Chapter CIII: Measurement of the Whale's Skeleton.

Ishmael's practical tattooing--using his skin as a notebook--is a remarkably broad-minded advance on Typee's trepidation at being marked as a cannibal, savagely disfigured and so unfit to return to civilization, in Melville's first novel. Typee's obvious discomfort prevented the Marquesan islanders from honoring him, as they saw it, with the tribal adornments to Melville's alter ego's immense relief.

Not so many years later--according to conventional chronology, anyway--Melville in Moby-Dick changes the tune; Ismael regards tattooing as means to either a practical or poetic end. In fact, due to the white whale's sinking of the Pequod, Ishmael loses all possessions save Queequeg's life-saving coffin and his own skin, fortuitously marked. (Queequeg's hieroglyphic and profound markings deserve a separate entry.)

I must quote Thomas Farber's wonderful line, his counter to Melville's famous opening: "Call me Queequeg."

Ishmael's poem must be that novel I'm rereading.