One Week to Go

It is still raining....make it stop. Actually the rain isn’t so bad; it’s the sitting in it for 5 hours that’s painful. My relationship with the tarp has improved since the rain started to come down, it actually serves a purpose now on Mt. Olympus other than slapping me in the head and interrupting my sentences. The tarp is especially entertaining when it starts to pool with water and bulge in the middle. This is when we get to flush it out the back like a wave; we have yet to drench a whale watcher below. The weather forecast is calling for sun over the weekend, with an increasing swell and high winds. This translates into a day off from counting whales, with sunny warm surf at Cylinders.

The whales are really starting to pick up in numbers, and the pods are becoming much looser as the breeding season starts to kick off. Yesterday we counted 81 whales in 10 hours, and that number should jump to maybe up to 200 in the next few days. With more whales comes more chaos; we’re having a hard time keeping track of the pods, and they keep splitting up and joining others. Sometimes we have as many as 7 Pods to follow past our field of view....CRAZY. There has also been a lot of breaching, tail slapping, pec slapping and possible singing going on as they prepare to mate. The data entry has been a nightmare as well. Cleaning the data takes about an hour per day, and entering it into excel another hour.

I’ve posted a snapshot of what a day’s data looks like in Cyclopes. The data is from the day of my trip on the Beluga, you can see where we were plotted. Boat Rock (where we dropped the hydrophone array) is the single rock just beyond the 3 closer rocks called The Group. This is actually a relatively slow day; they only counted about 50 animals. You can just imagine what a day of 100 plus animals may look like. Mt. Olympus is at the end of the bicolored line running down the middle called the ‘beam’. This line runs at about 78 degrees from our lookout. Every whale that crosses the beam gets counted for the day. All other pods, if they’re going south or milling and never cross, are excluded. Norm’s Seat is at the tip of the headland on the right, our other platform. You can even see where we went snorkelling and had to rescue Boy Mike (Paul); we started from the gorge (the sliver in the headland) and worked our way around the rocks and onto Frenchman’s Beach (the sand to the left of the headland).

I’m sure some of you would like an update on what’s going to happen with my job and all of that. I will be in Monterey for sure July 13th until the beginning of August. I may stay as long as September. It all depends on how fast I can get a working VISA for Australia and when a job comes through. I’m going to move my stuff out of Monterey, but will hopefully be allowed to crash with Louie, Lydia, and Kelly....and Sam until I work things out. I will also be working at the whale watch until the very end; apparently they are still short on people. So I hope to see everyone before I leave; I’m not sure when I will be back in the States after that.