RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR. Philip Hoare

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СКАЧАТЬ water that runs right up to Race Point: the falcate dorsal of a fin whale. For all its size, its black back too big to belong to a mere animal, it too is feeding on fish barely bigger than my finger. A pair of minkes, more modest rorquals, bearing the same strangely pleated bellies, join in. Then, as the boat pushes out over Stellwagen Bank’s great drowned plateau under the wide Atlantic sky, the ocean begins to erupt anew with the blows of dozens of humpbacks, back from their winter stay in the Caribbean.

      Then we are upon them, along with a thousand white-sided dolphin, weaving in and out as the great whales trap the sand eels in their bubble nets, rising through the corralled fish with mouths open wide, throats like rubbery concertinas, pleats clattering with barnacles like castanets. Gulls perch on the whales’ snouts to pick out titbits. And just when it seems the scene can sustain no more predators, a dozen more fin whales arrive, lunging on their sides, displaying the bristly baleen in their jaws.

      In this moment of witness, nothing else matters. Passengers delete images to make room for new ones on their cameras. My friend Jessica sees a couple frantically pressing the trash button as one says, ‘Dump the wedding ones.’

      Up on the bright white fly bridge, we watch the performance. A pair of adult fin whales aim straight for us. Each of them sixty feet long, at least.

      Hands tight to the wheel, our captain, Todd Motta, shouts, ‘Whoa!’ as the nearest whale sheers off our bow, surfing on its side to display its great white belly like some enormous salmon.

      ‘I thought it was going to hit us,’ says Todd.

      As experienced as he is, he’s momentarily shaken. The second largest animal on earth, normally betraying barely a tenth of its mass as it moves through the sea, has flashed its entire physical self at us, using our boat as a fish stop. We are an instrument as much as an engine of observation.

      All around us, the humpbacks continue to feed. One of the whales called Springboard rolls over to swim for a while on her back, displaying her genital mound, a region so gathered about with barnacles that it must make life uncomfortable for her suitors.

      ‘I’ve never seen that before,’ says Dennis.

      Or maybe he has; it’s so difficult to tell. Are these the same whales we just saw? The boat rocks and I stagger as I hold on to the clipboard and the rubber-encased GPS, regaining my footing to read off the coordinates for the pink photocopied sheets.

       70 degrees north 18 degrees west. Mn: 1/2.

      A calf holds its tail out of the waves, its body perpendicular in the water column. It trembles with its own life, the way a young boy’s body trembles in adolescence, quivering with hormones. Then it starts to smash up and down on the water.

      ‘Are these new animals?’ Dennis asks.

      I’ve no idea. The boat has turned round on itself, leaving a green swirling trail in its wake. The animals rise again, mouths as open as birds’ beaks. The passengers look over the railings, ecstatically, loudly excited or overcome with lassitude and boredom, in the way of all ordinary miracles. None of this is of any consequence, because it happens day after day. Only in the actual moment am I transported. Only then does it leave me, this sense that I am not really here at all. We shiver with life, and its alternative. Waiting to come out the other side.

      A few days later, we sail out of the harbour on another sunny morning. In the wheelhouse, I lean over the broad counter covered in what looks like wood-effect Formica from a seventies kitchen, peering at the chrome-ringed dials, updated with computer displays of the underwater terrain and a green radar screen silently scanning a black sea. We have left the land and its safety. An adhesive label announces the instructions for Marine Distress Communications to be relayed on the Submersible Plus VHF radio. Stuffed behind the sticky cup-holders is the Weekly Payroll Sheet.

      Everyone on the bridge is in a good mood, looking forward to the day. But as the depth gauge draws 206 feet, the outlook changes as abruptly as the ocean floor falls away beneath us. The land to our starboard – such as it is – has been submerged under a sea fret. It’s as if the view had reached the edge of an old projected film, fading into fuzzy nothingness.

      The boat sails straight into the mist and everything around us disappears. The land and sky vanish into one vast cloud; all we are left with are the few yards of water immediately around the boat. We’re entirely isolated, wrapped up in damp cotton wool. One minute, holiday sun; the next, murky obscurity.

      ‘How do you look for whales in conditions like this?’ I ask Lumby – Mark Dalomba, our captain for the day.

      His camouflage cap is pulled down over his eyes; he doesn’t turn round as he talks to me.

      ‘Cut off the engines and listen,’ he says. ‘For the sound of their blows.’

      But today Lumby has assistance. Chad Avellar, another young fisherman of Azorean descent who could sail these waters in the dark, is ahead of us, and radios back what he is seeing. Lumby charts a course ahead; or rather, he follows his own instincts. He plays the sea like a pinball machine. Perched on his captain’s seat, eyes always ahead, he stabs at the radar screen.

      ‘See those blips?’ he says, pointing at the luminous green blobs shaping and reshaping, coming together in one mottled mass, discrete from the sea clutter that the fish-finder produces when reflected by the waves. ‘Those are the whales.’

      Conditions deteriorate. The boat rolls with its weight and ours, lurching from side to side.

      ‘Crappy weather on the way,’ says Lumby.

      We seem to be moving ever slower, dragged back by the banks of fog. My heart sinks. It’s my last trip of the season. Even if we come upon whales, will we actually see them? Everything is grey. There’s no horizon, no context. We might as well have drifted into the Arctic, or the Bermuda Triangle, for that matter.

      The silence explodes with blows. Of course it does. We are surrounded by whales, as if they’d been there all along, only now choosing to break cover. The water bursts with their exhalations. We can’t tell sea from sky, but these animals are producing their own weather, their spouts merging with the mist.

      They are feeding, voraciously. Bellowing, blowing, rising up through their own bubble-clouds, eight whales at a time piercing the surface, cooperating in an orgy of consumption. It is a visceral, indisputable, audible furore. Whales are not tentative. They do not fuss and bother. They do not falter. They act, uproariously, greedily, and utterly in-their-moment.

      Lumby climbs up to the fly bridge. As he does so a dozen whales loom up right off the bow, their cavernous mouths open like gigantic frogs, fringed with baleen and roofed with pink strips like engorged tongues. It’s a fearsome sight. We follow Lumby aloft, clambering up after our captain as if trying to get away from the beasts.

      From our eyrie, we look down through the mist. Everywhere there are whales, lunging and fluking and kick-feeding, taking advantage of the fog to cover their gluttony. Fifteen humpbacks, maybe more.

      Then, as if roused by their mothers’ furious feeding, the calves begin to leap. One after another, spindle-shaped bodies shoot out of the sea like popguns going off. We don’t know where to look. Lumby holds the boat in position; he seems to be conducting the whole scene, even though he has lost control, like the rest of us.

      ‘Jesus Christ,’ I exclaim, then apologise, hoping the passengers haven’t heard me.

      ‘No,’ says Liz, the poet naturalist. СКАЧАТЬ