Sperm Whales!

OK, I know I owe you all a blog post or three about St. Lucia and the last couple of weeks.  I’ve already been chastised by my best friend for being a slacker in this.  But I’m going to jump ahead with this post and talk about our sail from St. Lucia to Bequia today.

This morning we left the stunningly beautiful Pitons, near the town of Soufriere in St. Lucia to head to St. Vincent and the Grenadines.  Soufriere and St. Lucia get their own posts, but here is a look ahead picture anyway.

It was an overcast gray day with rain, but the comparison to the logo of our favorite local beer on St. Lucia was still quite evident.  The currents around the Pitons are nearly as tricky as the winds – they rip around the points and converge in a ripply mess in front of the mountains.  Whereas the winds come sheering down off the mountains, and between the mountains, around the mountains and from what I could tell maybe even UNDER the mountains as the wind shifted through about 180 degrees while we were trying to sail out. 

But the day was generally windless and after giving up trying to sail in anything close to a straight line away from here we motorsailed towards Bequia.

Several times throughout the day we found rain, but in a short time the winds picked up and we we able to set full sail and cut the engine, reaching along at an easy seven knots.  Right into a found current that was slowing is and seemingly pushing us off course to the West by some 1-2 miles every hour.  Compensation was the order of the day.

At some point Will observed that this day was a gray overcast day, just like the time we sailed across the Stellwagon Bank and saw some Humpback whales (sorry…no blog entry, I was even worse then).  And how cool would it be if we saw some whales?

Dad, being Dad the the Authority on These Sorts of Things replied “Yeah it would, but I’m sure all the humpbacks are on their way North by now, we won’t see any of them.”

Well I was both right (no humpbacks) and wrong (no whales), not ten or fifteen minutes later I saw a big spray and a black back ahead of us and to starboard.  “WHALE!  Or some sort of marine mammal!” I shouted.  We all looked and we saw a group of 3-4 whales at the surface, breathing and moving about.  We weren’t really close enough to get a good identification on them, but we knew they were much too big to be pilot whales.  Unfortunately while we had the camera handy we didn’t have the good telephoto so we didn’t get much more than a spout in the distance.

We were all charged up as we watched them drop behind us in the distance.  Danielle went and retrieved one of her whale guide books and we started trying to figure out what we saw.  As we were doing this, we sailed right up to this fellow, who was lounging at the surface not more than 10 yards from the boat.  He very obligingly poked his distinctive blunt head above the water for us to have a good look and confirm that we were looking at our first Sperm Whales!

We were obviously quite close, as you can see our main sheet there in the foreground, but we were also sailing along at a pretty decent clip and he quickly fell behind as he circled behind the boat.  As we pulled away, he sounded with a goodbye wave of his flukes.

This day is definitely one of the memories that will always last!