August 21th, 1995

August 21st, 1995

By the time we got to Fred Sharpe yesterday the communal bubble net feeding had mostly stopped, but today was different. We got it. We really got it. After a morning of fog and low clouds the sky suddenly cleared and the whales we had been following all morning by listening to the sounds of their breathing through the fog were suddenly visible all around us. Best of all they were feeding with communal bubble nets.

We launched the inflatable, and put the gyrostabilizer on it with the massive IMAX camera perched atop that. On about the third try for close-up shots of the whales coming up together in the bubble net the boat had its bow in the bubble net when Dennis (normally the camera assistant but now the interim photographer while we wait for Andy to escape the clutches of Immigration) started shooting just as the entire group of 9 whales burst through the water so close to the boat you might have touched the closest whale. It all filled the screen and the IMAX types were ecstatic. The thing that pleased Fred and me was that it put us in a good position to measure the depth of the bubbles making up the net-something he has been doing whenever it is possible. I have suggested that he steam across the net twice so as to get two "snapshots" of it on his sonar so he can see how fast various sections of it are rising by how far the bubbles have progressed between passes over them.

Tonight we had salmon mousse to celebrate. Dinner started out with Japanese Sushi-it turns out our cook for this trip, Peter, is not the kind of part time cook I'm used to but head chef at the Park Plaza hotel in Boston where he has 52 other chefs working under him. He's passionate about whales and has contributed his time to cook on this trip. The Sushi was thanks to the fact that he apprenticed for two years to a master Sushi Chef while working in one of London's most prestigious hotels. I've lead over 100 expeditions to study whales, but I've never encountered anything like this. Looks like we're going to be utterly spoiled on this one.