I think maybe many whale watching guides can agree that Minke whales can be quite tricky. They are so beautiful and I personally would love to see them underwater in Australia, where I think they do it really responsibly because you just hold on to a line. But I have never done that.
And of course they can be a little bit underwhelming when you see them from the surface. They can be really hard to watch and pop up so quickly. And sometimes we just know there’s a Minke Whale around in Iceland, but we just can’t get all the passengers to see it. And we actually sometimes have to give free tickets to passengers to come back, even though we had a whale and we found a whale, but we know not everybody has seen them.
But of course they are also famous for sometimes getting friendly and curious. And I’ve been lucky enough to see that briefly in Antarctica, where we had an Antarctic Minke Whale that actually circled the ship in Antarctica, so it went all the way around our big Antarctic ship, in glorious weather.
But I think my most memorable Minke Whale experience was in Iceland. And I’ve now done thousands of trips in Iceland and this is the only time we have had a super curious Minke Whale It was quite rough weather, and we had quite a few people, unfortunately, who were getting seasick. But when we had a whale just circling the boat for around, I don’t know, 30, 35, 40 minutes, we were not going to move the boat. We were going to wait for the whale to get bored before we moved the boat. So I remember saying sorry to a few seasick people who just wanted to go home and, telling them sorry we couldn’t.
But we had what was probably a young Minke Whale circle us, stick its head out of the water frequently all around. The boat gave everybody a chance to look at it. And, what was so unusual was to see a Minke Whale’s eye. I think that was so cool.
And just the shape of their nose. They’re so different to the whales that we’re more often seeing curious, like the gray whales and the humpback whales.
But I think what made it even more special in a country like Iceland is that unfortunately, Minke Whales were still being hunted back then. And I remember us all just thinking, please, please go safe and don’t do this to the wrong boat, little Minke whale.
Once it decided to leave us and sad to say after all these years of me working in Iceland and telling people every day on the boat that the whaling was probably coming to an end because that’s how everybody felt in Iceland, public opinion is so against it now, but the one super rich man that wants to keep it going has so many friends in government, I’m very, very sad to say that, Minke Whaling is starting again in Iceland this summer after a long hiatus where they haven’t been hunting them.
So that’s a very sad piece of news. But I hope you like my story. I’m sorry it’s ending on a depressing note, but let’s all fight together to hopefully end whaling forever.
This post was adapted from a voice recording in episode 81 of the Whale Tales Podcast, listen here.
-Judith
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