Thar she bloooooows... Hard 'a port!
A year afloat: to the Caribbean and back
Sam and Alex Fortescue
Sat 30 Jul 2011 15:47
|
39:12.72N
033:11.58W
I'm not sure what, but something induced me to
stand up and take a long look around the empty horizon yesterday afternoon.
There was not a ship or a buoy in sight, but just a few hundred yards ahead, a
large grey object bobbed in the water. We were on a collision course for
whatever-it-was.
As I stared, trying to get the measure of the
thing, a great spout of white water erupted from the mass. Then it arched its
back and a fin rolled lazily over into the water. It was a sperm
whale.
Ten tons of immobililty is never a good thing to
run plum into if you're a five ton boat. The physics of it aren't on your side,
you see. With some urgency, I told Chris to turn hard to port. It still wasn't
clear if the beast was moving one way or the other, or simply lolling in the
water. We wheeled around, leaving it a hundred yards to starboard, but the beast
didn't move.
It would stick its head out of the water every now
and then to spout and breathe, then a fin would appear for a moment. As we ran
behind it, the whale resembled nothing more than a knobbly grey tree trunk, just
awash in the gentle swell.
Suspecting that we'd missed a trick by not getting
closer, we gybed round and inched back towards the beast, thinking to get a good
photo and even to touch it. He must have been keeping a lazy eye on us though,
or recalled some distant folk memory of being chased by Azoreans in boats,
because he soon began to move slowly away from us. All of a sudden, the whale's
giant flukes rose dripping from the water and it sounded - not to be seen by us
again.
Of course, once you've seen a whale at close
quarters, you are on full scale cetacean alert. The innocuous waters around us
suddenly seemed to be heaving with unseen whales of all descriptions; every time
we turned our heads to scan a new bit of ocean, there seemed to be mighty ripple
just subsiding or a half-seen flash of grey. Whale fever gripped us, to the
extent that Elise was anxious to know what the drill was in the event of sailing
into one during the night. There's really nothing you can do, I said,
reassuringly, other than knock the engine into neutral and hold on tight. We all
lay awake, waiting for the inevitable thunk of whale flesh against the
hull.
In other news, there's not much other news. In what
is becoming a pattern, the wind died away after sunset, forcing us to donk up
for the night. We ran the fuel tank dry this morning. Not in itself a problem,
as we have another 120 litres stored in jerry cans. But it's never kind to the
fuel filters to drain every last drop of diesel and crud from the tank. We
refilled, bled the fuel system down and fired up the donk again with few
problems.
As I type, we've just clicked under the 100-mile to
go barrier. At our present leisurely rate of 4.5 knots, we should be arriving in
Flores tomorrow morning after breakfast. The island is apparently visible from
up to 40 miles away, although probably not in the current cloudy atmosphere. The
air is heavy and humid, the pressure high, and it now just seems like a waiting
game.
|