Saturday afternoon we drove three hours in horizontal rain to Warranmbool. We stayed in a motel. Apparently tea and biscuits taste different in motels. The purpose of this trip was to see the Southern Right Whales in their ‘nursery’. Southern Right Whales have been calving in this bay for decades and viewings at this time of year are fairly certain…
♥ we saw whales!
♥ great! how many?
♥ um… ?
♥ don’t you know how many?
Between showers there was bright sunshine and rainbows spanning the sky, dropping coloured beams onto the horizon. The whales were close; only 50m from the shore. From the viewing platform at the top of the dunes that backdrop the beach, we saw at least one mother-calf pair and possibly another single adult or mother and calf. It’s hard to say how many as they didn’t all come to the surface at the smae time. They were breaching and rolling, spending minutes on the surface before falling back below the surf.
It always feels special to see a whale, but seeing Southern Rights is an even more amazing experinece because, despite them visiting this nursery every year now, there are so very few of them in the oceans. There used to be more than 600 000 before whaling. Not so long ago there were only 1000 left. They are called Right whales because, being 40% blubber, they float when dead. This makes they the ‘right’ whale to hunt. Gruesome name when you think about it. Their population is going up now, but it is still special to be able to see a rare, huge, smiling creature of the deep.
The whales were still too far for pics with my camera but I took some others of the lovely light that poured through the clouds between the showers!