Not too eventful of a day today, but I had an INCREDIBLE experience at night.
I went for usual shift at 11:00pm to relieve Jan of her duties, and while she was updating me on the events of the night, we kept hearing this sound coming from under the boat that sounded identical to a whale's blowhole. Jan said it had been happening for an hour and 'you'd think there was a whale right beside the boat". We shrugged it off as just water getting trapped below the boat and shooting out when the boat rocked. Jan went down to bed and I started my watch.
This 'blowhole' noise kept happening in fairly regular intervals at the beginning of my shift, I was confused because after 4 months on this boat, this was the first time I had heard this noise. Also, I don't think that air CAn get trapped under the boat due to its shape, there is nowhere air could get trapped. I still shrugged it off, even though the sound startled me every friggin time as it was so sudden and loud and on all sides of the boat.
It started raining after while, so I cocooned myself up in a towel to keep somewhat dry. I was comfortable and didn't want to move, but I noticed the wind suddenly shifted and the sail was flapping around, so I broke free of my cocoon and flipped on the spreader lights to bring in the sail. The spreader light shines down from the mast onto the sail and the deck and is really bright, so it does a good job of illuminating the whole deck and some of the water surrounding the boat. As I was pulling the sail in, I suddenly see out of the corner of my eye, just 5 feet from where I am sitting, a massive body rise up from the sea and blow a huge spout of air and water, and hence make that sound I had been hearing. So there it was, a giant whale swimming alongside our boat, blowin' air for the past hour and a half. I jumped so high, I could have repaired a halyard at the top of the mast while I was up there.
I ran down below and woke Jan and Gary, grabbed my waterproof camera and flashlight, and bolted back up to the cockpit. I shone my light into the water beside the boat, and set it to its highest light power. The whale seemed to be attracted to my light, because he kept coming up on the same side of the boat, right where my light was. He was a good 30 feet long and had the general body structure of a humpback. He was greyish in colour with some white spots amd had a very pointy snout. I tied myself to the boat and hung my body over the side to get some good close-up video of him coming up for air. I even braved shoving my hand underwater to get some shots of him swimming below the boat. Unfortunately, even with all that light we were shining on the water, the GoPro is absolutely terrible at night shooting and there is little salvageable shots from the hours of video I took. The sound turned out though, you can here the blowhole making its sound, and then us screaming with excitement immediately after. Here, sadly, are the 'best' two shots I could extract from the video:
The whale followed our boat for a total of 3 hours and came up for air every 2 or 3 minutes, so we got to see him many times. It was a magical experience to say the least and one which I believe is extremely rare. One of the many great animal encounters on this trip.
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