Celebration Time!! Whales! Two of them breaching

Photo of Breaching Humpback By Whit Welles

and tail lobbing on the other side of the inlet! Barking rifle shots of sound shoot across the water when their bodies crash down in cascades of spray. I can hear the guys who are working uphill from our campsite explode into shouts of exhilaration every time a humpback hits the ocean. Truly awesome beings.

What are they doing over there? Are they playing? shedding barnacle larvae off their sensitive skin? stunning a shoal of fish for dinner? They don’t look as if they are feeding. We watch as they disappear further into the inlet and wish they’d come our way.

But we are so lucky to be camping on the shores of Jervis Inlet. It has been quite discouraging not being able to get out in our sailboat to meet whales this year. So when Jamie’s phone call came through from Jervis Inlet our ears perked. Jamie is a wizard with wood who is living in his trailer at the local marina while rebuilding two abandoned plywood trimarans.

“Hey you two,” he greeted us nonchalantly, “there’s whales down here. They’re breaching and breathing and making trumpet sounds.” We were out the door with a tent and our camera and sound gear as soon as we could cram it all into “Goldish” our much smaller replacement for beloved Beluga.

Jervis Inlet is a very deep body of water: maximum depth 732 metres (2,402 ft), perfect for the large clouds of krill (tiny shrimp) that humpback whales love to engulf in their cavernous mouths. Humpbacks are rorquals like blue, fin, sei and Bryde’s whales. Flexible fibrous plates, looking something like vertical combs grow from their upper jaws.

Photo of Open Mouth Humpback by Francois Gohier

The plates, called baleen, consist of tightly packed fibres which fray at the ends into thick, brush-like hair. Baleen grows as long as 0.91m (3 ft ). A humpback can swallow gargantuan mouthfuls of ocean water containing the small fish and krill they relish. Then they use their tongue (about the size of a Volkswagon Beetle)  to sieve the water out through the baleen leaving dinner trapped in the hairs.

If you are sailing or motoring in waters where whales feed, are you terrified about your boat disappearing down the gullet of a lunge feeding whale? Jonah aside, there are no known incidents of whales accidentally swallowing humans. But you may be relieved to learn that the opening at the back of a humpback’s throat is only the size of a grapefruit, rather too small for passing a human.