Hello, I’m Jess I, a whale researcher, part of small charity called whale wise. And WhaleWise’s aim is to promote a world where whales and humans can coexist in harmony. And we also do a lot through public engagement and social media as well. But our main part of WhaleWise is the research seasons that we undertake in Iceland. And I’ve been part of three research seasons so far, each time doing something slightly different, although the past two years have been part of the same project. And my story is a story from our past field season, where we were living in Iceland, and we were living in a small town in the West Fjords of Iceland. And I was living in this particular part of Iceland for around a month and a half. But the season was actually much longer, but we had people leave before so I was in the second half of the season. And I was living in a small cabin, which we had as part of our research team on the edge of the land. So when as you went outside, you could just see the ocean, it was very beautiful, surrounded by the ocean, and also the mountains. And my story, a particular whale memory favorite of mine is one evening that we spent as a research team inside the cabin. So you’ll have to wait because of course, there were no whales in the cabin. But the story does include myself, and also my two research colleagues and friends, Flo and Ellie.

So we every day to give you some context, were flying drones over the humpback whales to get some videos to subsequently get some images of whales from an aerial view of the whale to look for scars, particularly from fishing nets. So this was kind of the basis of our field season. But at this particular time, we’ve been having quite bad luck with weather, which meant that we couldn’t go outside and do our research as we normally would. So it was a bit of a frustrating few days, we’d been locked inside the cabin for what felt like far too long. But of course, we had each other so it wasn’t so bad. But we were missing the whales. And one evening, we were getting ready to go to sleep. It was dark. And we had finished our tea, we were just chatting. And Ellie, one of the girls I was telling you about suddenly said to us because her room was just next to the door of the cabin. And she said guys, I can hear something outside. I’m just gonna go and check and Flo and I said, okay, yes, go and check. She came back running in and she was like, you’ll never believe it, but I can hear whales everywhere. And we said, oh my gosh, of course, this was amazing. And we’ve been having some quite bad days for research. So this is exactly what we wanted to hear.

And of course, it was dark. So it meant that we couldn’t do our research, we couldn’t fly the drone. But this, in a way was really perfect, because it just meant that we had no choice but to just enjoy our surroundings. So we ran outside, and our cabin literally had the best view I’ve ever had, particularly of a place to live. And so we just went outside, and we sat on the rocks, and we had all of our dry ribs. And we couldn’t see anything. But we could just hear whales breathing everywhere. It felt like surround sound. The whales are blowing, there could there must have been it felt like there were 20 plus humpback whales out there. And of course, normally when we’re outside looking for whales and listening for whales, you do automatically kind of connect the sound of their breath with seeing the whales out there. So this was a very special moment because of course it was dark. So we just had to rely almost on our imagination. And I can imagine that all of us were picturing so many whales. And it seemed as though they were so close to us. And it was just a very special moment considering we’d had the lack of research and activity for the past days due to the bad weather. So this was a deeply magical moment for all of us. And we sat outside for around half an hour just listening to these humpbacks blowing.

And it really felt like in that moment we were very, very connected to our work and also to our passion for these beautiful and mysterious animals. And what made it even better was that there were also northern lights in the sky at this time and we saw a comet that night. So I think if you ask not just me but also Ellie and Flo, this is one of the best memories of our field season this year, and in fact, one of my favorite whale memories of my three years working and living amongst the whales.

So the reason that this story is a very special memory of ours is because the fact that we were imagining 20 plus whales was actually quite unrealistic. So in reality, there probably weren’t that many. But because we couldn’t see, and we could only hear, we could almost get away with imagining that there were this many whales in the in the bay or in the fjord around us. And so normally, when we would go out on an app, on average, we would say maybe groups of three to four whales together at a time, and then in the future, totally, maybe more like eight or nine, but eight or nine would be a good number, but definitely never as many as 20 plus. So I think that’s also why it was so special, because it really allowed us to imagine the whales and almost exaggerate this a little bit because of course, that’s what imagination is, and it’s very beautiful.

-Jess from WhaleWise