Whale of a Tale

  • We almost ran into the monster, whilst cruising on shallow seas through short steep waves. It was at a time when adventuring yachties and readers of the novel 'Moby Dick' still believed that whales were angry monsters that would attack and smash a boat to pieces and around the time Sikaflex was invented. It happened two years before Greenpeace launched its first anti-whaling campaign and it was still four years until the National Geographic would publish and introduce the world to the plight and ‘Songs of the Humpback Whale’. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WOjJIynHgM
  • The north-west-coast of New Zealand was poorly charted back then, maybe it still is. Our charts were notarized with comments from early explorers warning of shallow seas and shifting sandy bottoms. The Admiralty Pilot Books which we carried also had little information. It was a time when most cruising yachties still navigated with paper charts, Walker-Logs and sextants in wooden boats fastened with copper nails and two-inch thick teak planked decks sealed with pitch. Sure, there were a few fiberglass cruising yachts in the early seventies, but serious sailors snubbed their noses at them, most preferring wood, steel and even concrete designs to fiberglass.
  • Valhalla a classic ketch, built in Sydney, Australian of Tasmanian Huon-Pine in 1953 is sixty-one feet in length and weighs, if I recall correctly, 53 ton. But she was dwarfed this day, by the sudden appearance alongside of an enormous surfacing blue-whale, accompanied by the smell of rotting krill from her blow. These rulers of oceans, can according to google, grow up to “100 feet long and upwards of 200 tons.” I can still see her huge eye judging us, as she sailed with her calf alongside her, through the twenty-foot seas. Mother and child came within 50ft, the cow’s ellipsoid eye, the size of a drawn-out dinner-plate, unreflective, unblinking, just watching.  


  • We held our course and stared back, speculating about her intentions, flashes of ‘Moby Dick’ raced through my mind as we prayed that her intentions weren’t to smash us to pieces. Each time she disappeared we imagined her surfacing beneath us. She was longer than our sixty-one feet and two or three times the size in bulk girth, and quite capable of smashing in the side of Valhalla. She frightened the hell out of us at first and we posted lookouts fore and aft waiting for her to reappear after each time she sounded. But as we settled down and cruised together in awe, cow and calf sailing with us through heavy seas we began to imagine she was enjoying our company and that maybe she was just showing off her newborn. Mother and baby cruised with us for about 20 minutes that delightful day. In retrospect, one of my more enjoyable sailing recollections. 
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