When I had a sabbatical, which I’m very fortunate to have every now and again, certainly makes it easier to do research if you’re not teaching and doing admin and everything.
I went down to Chile where one of the best places in the world to see blue whales And Barbara Galletti and Elsa Cabrera work down there. And they have this beautiful spot on the, on the cliff with a more than 180-degree view where blue wells do sometimes come close to shore. And I went down there thinking, well, I’m finally going to maybe have a chance to see blue whales because I do all this work on computers and analyzing stuff and modeling things and data analysis and meta-analysis that stuff.
And but you have to understand this is like in the 40’s latitude and the, the waves are kind of big offshore of, Chiloe Island. And Barbara took me out on the boat and this boat is open, open boat, tiny little boat with an outdoor, motor and so on, off we go. And we went for hours and hours and hours battering through these huge swells and, and so on. And it was very uncomfortable. We didn’t see a single blue whale.
And I banked on, had been there for about a week and I was like, I’ll have all these fun experiences. And then the next few days there were huge swells and even she didn’t want to go out. And then on about day four, the swells looked just as big and just as dangerous. And you know, I’d been on the boat, and I’d said, why aren’t you wearing a life jacket? If you capsize, you fall in the water, it’s freezing water. She said, well, there’s really no point because there’s no one out here to rescue us. So, the only reason to wear a life jacket would be so someone can find you.
Anyway, day seven dawned, the last day I was going to be there and it was absolutely flat, calm, and, and she was like, all right, let’s go. We’ll, we’ll, we’ll go out, you know, we’ll maybe see some blue whales. And off we went. Same idea. And we went far away from shore, and we zigzagged backwards and forwards and there was just nothing. And we saw albatrosses and we saw all kinds of other things that. No, no blue whales at all. And you know, Elsa said, all right, it’s time, it’s time to go back.
We turned around, headed back to shore and boom, they had popped up a whole suite of Blue Whale there were blue whale spots in the distance. There were blue whales right next to us. Great for photo ID. I’ve never been so happy in my life.
It was everything I dreamed of and more and more.
-Trevor
This post was adapted from a voice recording in episode 83 of the Whale Tales Podcast, listen here
Photos by E. Cabrera, Centro de Conservación Cetacea: CCC Chile
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