Company

The other day, during one of the frequent windless spells on this longer-than-expected passage, Jennifer voiced a desire to see a mammal. We've been visited regularly by birds and bioluminescent cellular creatures, but aside from the three other crew, mammals have been noticeably absent from our environment. We can usually count on some porpoises, and we had a few visit us in the first few days, but, 9 days in to this passage from Mauritius to South Africa, Jennifer was getting, well, lonesome.

The following night, just after dinner, Geert made his usual way up to the helm station, making one of his regular visits to make sure the various electronic devices were working up to specs. Geert is a traditionalist, a welcome addition to this techno-dependent scribe's perhaps-excessive reliance on the newest gadget, although I get the sense he's come to appreciate the finer elements of autopilots and chartplotters. Not five minutes passed, when the phrase "Thar she blows," uttered in his Dutch-accented English, brought us all up on deck. A few moments later, a long grey humpback whale swam lazily alongside our sailboat, the top of its great, stippled body revealing the eponymous triangular wedge, or humpback, of one of nature's largest mammals.

What Jennifer wants, Jennifer gets.

We had last seen whales in close proximity during our unforgettable snorkeling expedition in Tonga, and before that, when a pair of humpbacks escorted us out of the tiny harbor in Rarotonga. In earlier times, Jennifer had sailed with them during her trans-Atlantic crossing, famously "braking for whales" when one appeared just ahead of our little boat on her way to the Azores. I've seen them from time to time as well, most recently on a Bermuda passage on my friend Terry's boat. Each time, the arrival of a visiting whale leaves me gawking at their majestic, sinuous glide through the water, their passing punctuated by the regular 'shooshing' of water vapor being expelled from their blowholes. This trip's visit was no exception, and we spent the remaining minutes between dusk and dark staring at the 15 meter mammal that swam alongside us, not 20 meters off the port hull, breathing regularly, seeming not to break a sweat as he checked us out, even as we gazed starstruck.

As the whale's body traced a slick wake just south of our boat, its length and girth approaching our vessel's size, I recalled a recent note posted on the reference website for ocean passagemakers, www.noonsite.com, alerting sailors to a recent instance where a whale breached and landed on a sailboat off the coast of South Africa. Our experience has been that these graceful behemoths are extraordinarily aware of their marine surroundings, as evidenced by the apparent deliberate avoidance of our seal-like snorkeling bodies during our Tongan foray. Nonetheless, facts are stubborn things, so I was mentally rehearsing the procedures for abandoning our ship while simultaneously drinking in the magic of the moment.

The next day, recounting our sighting to a fellow cruiser on our twice-daily ham radio chat, he asked if we were scared at the close approach of the whale, and I replied, in an overly-nonchalant way, "No - it's not like we had any choice," to which we both chuckled the nervous laugh of people who knew better.

Unhappily, we've not seen our passing cetacean or any of its pod-based friends since - the whale probably let the pod know we were friendly, not having seen a Japanese whaling ship flag or harpoon gun on our foredeck. Its appearance however, foreshadowed a second act to the natural world's traveling show of unique maritime wonders.

The next day, as if to prove that there's more than just mammals in the sea, nature treated us to a second remarkable spectacle, this one from the non-mammalian denizens of our salty biosphere. At 7 in the morning, as Jennifer and I were reliving the prior night's whale sighting, I spied a set of splashes off the port bow, splashes that soon multiplied, even as sea birds began to arrive from who-knows-where to check out the action. After a few minutes, it became clear that a great school of tuna was feeding near the surface, churning up the dawn-gray, rubbery surface of a windless sea. Every minute or so, a bullet-shaped streak of yellow-limned muscle would leap out of the sea in a short arc, surrounding by churning water and other frothing tuna.

In a matter of minutes, the empty sky was filled with sea birds flying in from all directions, alerted to the presence of leftover scraps by the screeching of their earlier-arriving avian companions. Before long, over 300 birds were skittering about the sea surface above the feeding orgy, adding yet another layer of frenzy to the morning's schedule. We were over 200 miles from land, and normally, these pelagic birds travel solo, or in pairs, so I amazed at these birds' ability to communicate the presence of food to their avian kin across dozens of miles of ocean in an apparent instant.

We sailed on, westward, and watched the feeding school of tuna and scavenging flock of birds remain resolutely about 200 meters in front of our boat, as if they were pulling us along, moving together, school, flock, and boat towards Africa, 4-5 nautical miles per hour. This went on for an hour or so before we began to theorize, perhaps anthropomorphically, that this school of tuna was using the westward motion - and surface disruption - of our boat to help school the bait fish. We were the horses behind the cattle stampede, driving the baitfish forward, allowing the tuna to concentrate on the feeding. Evidence for this perhaps-naïve theory came an hour later - a full two hours after the feeding frenzy began - when the wind conditions shifted and we turned the boat to the northwest, a full 45 degrees off the prior course.

As if they had approved the memo directing the course change, the still-significant flock of pelagic birds, the still-churning school of tuna, and, presumably, the ever-diminishing assembly of bait fish took a collective turn to the northwest, remaining about 200 meters off our bow. In the end, the spectacle played out on our proverbial front yard for a solid five hours, without letup. We had traveled over 20 miles, in a elbow-shaped arc across a vast ocean, and for every step of the way, our path was paved by baitfish, tuna, and sea birds.

I suppose we might have played an unwitting part in the herding of the baitfish, but it's hard to fathom the means by which the tuna managed to keep the baitfish school contained even with our vessel's assist from the stern. The entire drama of "big-fish-eat-little-fish=and-birds-pick-up-the-pieces" played out in a 50 meter-wide rectangle extending from between 200 to 400 meters off our bow - a rectangular cafeteria of 1000 square meters - one hectare. These dimensions remained unchanged regardless of our bow's direction, or, for that matter, our boat's speed, which varied from 3 to 5 knots.

Over an 18 hour period, the four humans on ile de Grace were treated to remarkable display of marine life at its wildest. Alone on an ocean, with only ourselves for company, we appreciated the distraction, and felt blessed to have had the chance to bear unexpected witness to these demonstrations of inexplicable natural phenomena, to these curious cetaceans, these herding tuna, and these magic gatherings of foraging sea birds. Lonesome no more.