Gentle Giants

Routine trip yields once-in-a-lifetime memories.

In August 2010, my husband, Rick, and I spent the night aboard Footprints, our 37-foot Irwin sailboat so we could get an early start. The next day, we rose before dawn and were under way by 0600.

I asked Rick not to raise the sails. If you have no particular place to be, it’s refreshing to let the wind propel you forward as dolphins frolic around you. But today was not for sailing. Today we were picking up our 20-year-old son, Brent, and his three friends after a weeklong camping trip on California’s Catalina Island.

We wanted to leave early because the trip would take five hours there and five hours back. I’ve never been on the water after dark and didn’t want this trip to be my first time—especially if the weather didn’t hold.

A chill set in as we left Angels Gate in San Pedro. I went below to get another jacket; we engaged the autopilot and settled into the trip.

Sometimes I have difficulty judging distances from objects on the water and think we’re on a collision course with another boat. I want to alter course immediately, but Rick wants to wait until we are closer to make a decision. When we get closer, the other boat usually crosses in front of or sometimes behind us.

Halfway through this trip, I decided to take a nap in the cockpit. I was dozing when Rick yelled, “Sharon get up. There’s a whale.”

I jumped up and asked where.

“Right there in front of us!” he said.

Sure enough, I spied a gray mass directly in front of the bow. In the three years Rick and I had been ocean sailing, this was only the third time I’d seen a whale.

The whale submerged and reappeared several seconds later, not in a remote location but directly in front of the bow.

“We’re going to hit it,” I said.

Rick said it would pass by. Again, the whale submerged and reappeared in front of the bow. I wanted to change course, but Rick assured me that we would be fine. The whale repeated the pattern several times, always reappearing directly in front of the bow.

Finally, I yelled, “We’re going to hit it!”

Realizing that I was right this time, Rick put Footprints in reverse, slowing our forward speed. With the boat on autopilot, we had no time to change direction.

Still directly in front of the bow, the whale submerged again, avoiding collision, and reappeared not far off the starboard stern near another whale. We sat there, trying to comprehend what we’d just witnessed. We couldn’t understand why the whale never cleared the bow. Although it seemed to lumber slowly through the greenish-blue water, a sailboat also motors slowly, so the whale should have had plenty of time to cross our path.

Rick promised never to let a whale remain in front of our bow again.

Later that morning, we tied up to a buoy close to Avalon. Rick hailed a water taxi to transfer the boys and their gear to the boat. I had lunch ready when they climbed aboard. Afterward, we began the journey home. The boys retired below, leaving Rick and me alone in the cockpit.

During the last third of the trip, we spotted a couple of whales in the distance. One of the boys came up to see, but the whales disappeared beneath the blanket of water before he got a glimpse. Seeing four whales in one day was unusual.

On the way back, I texted my sister and a girlfriend about our close encounter with what I thought were gray whales, which didn’t make sense because late August isn’t their migration season.

We told our story to other boaters over dinner the next evening. They said that we had nearly hit a blue, not a gray, whale and that a blue whale can sink a boat.

The following Saturday, Rick and I left the harbor around 0800 to head to Marina del Rey for a couple of days. Once beyond Angels Gate, we turned back. The fog was thick and becoming even thicker. Although we were just outside the breakwater, we couldn’t see the lighthouse.

Instead of making the 40-minute trip back to our slip, we motored around the breakwater for an hour and tried leaving a second time, returning once again because the fog was too thick. We repeated this four more times until 1330 when the fog finally lifted.

The night before, we’d heard a news report about the unusual number of blue whale sightings. A large pod had been seen in the waters off Palos Verde. Although we have radar, it doesn’t detect whales, and we couldn’t chance leaving in the fog.

On the way back from Marina del Rey that Monday, we heard a man on the radio say he had been on these waters for 40 years and had never experienced anything like it. Other people gave directions to where they were sighting the whales.

I wanted to see the whales again, just not in front of my bow, and searched with binoculars to no avail. Finally, Rick spotted a whale in the distance. I spied its tail in the air.

Later that day, we spotted several boats huddled close together whale watching, so we joined them. A couple of people on paddle boards headed toward the whales.

As dangerous as it might be, I understood why the paddle boarders encroached on the whales’ space. I too wanted to see these magnificent gentle giants up close, to experience being in the presence of their massive forms.

Blue whales are the largest animals known to have existed. They can grow slightly longer than 100 feet and up to 200 short tons, or 400,000 pounds. An adult blue whale can be as big as a house, so it’s no wonder it never cleared our bow!

In the early part of the 20th century, blue whales were hunted close to extinction. An international ban on hunting blue whales was enacted in 1966.

Although the number of whales spotted off the California coast has been on the rise, the uncommonly high numbers seen in August 2010 may have been a once-in-a-lifetime event brought on by an unusually cool summer that attracted more krill, the whales’ primary food source.

I would like to be in the presence of a blue whale again, but I still never want to collide with one.

Sharon and Rick Tanner are members of Alamitos Sail & Power Squadron. They enjoy sailing their Irwin 37 in Southern California waters and someday hope to take it much farther from home.