Mouth-watering adventures at sea

Damien Enright on his encounters with whales

PAST midnight on the night of last month’s full moon, I was intrigued to see two herons flying across the dark blue sky squawking to one another.

Earlier that day I had heard whales clicking and crooning beneath the boat in which we rode a calm sea in watery sunlight five miles off Galley Head in west Cork. Such is the magic of Ireland.

Whales were all around us. To port, two sportive humpbacks, to starboard two enormous finbacks. The fin whales passed us in majesty, over 70ft long, four times the length of our living room; they are the second largest creatures on earth. They showed no concern at our proximity. It must have been easy indeed for whalers to harpoon their prey.

We had located them by pinpointing a pillar of spume rising out of the sea, and by the bird-clouds. As Colin Barnes, our skipper, drove us at high speed from bird-cloud to bird-cloud, dolphins raced the boat as if for sport.

‘Footprints’ left on the surface showed where the whales had dived — smooth water, like in the wake of a boat. Where they had fed, luminescent spots drifted in the deep, scales from the sprat they’d swallowed. Finbacks eat two tons per day, humpbacks in excess of a ton. There are some 40 whales between the Old Head of Kinsale and Galley. Some have been there for months. How fecund is our sea! As we drifted gently, time and again whales rose from the deep and rolled their massive backs out of the water only yards away. Sometimes, a humpback, making a steep dive, would raise its tail against the sky. It was awesome not only to witness the reality of that iconic image but to be so close to it, lifting out of the ocean, a tail fifteen feet across.

The serrations on the fluke are recorded by experts like marks on an ogham stone. Thus are individual whales identified, and humpbacks monitored on their migration. The movements of fin whales, however, are less well known.

The bird-clouds, too, were spectacular. Dicing with death, the seabirds feed on the balls of sprat driven to the surface by the whales. Seagulls snap, kittiwakes plunge-dive and gannets rocket into the shoal even as the huge maw of the whale drives up from the deep to engulf it. But on that glorious winter day of high seas adventure, we witnessed something Colin Barnes has never before seen in 43 years at sea.

In a small area of water, 20 kittiwakes and gulls lay floating dead, two gannets among them. We took one gannet aboard, a beautiful bird, snow white with black wingtips, its body still warm beneath the dense feathers of its breast. What could have happened to these birds, newly dead? They could not have been poisoned; we were miles offshore on the open ocean. A whale could be the only explanation, inadvertent slaughter by a whale.

A humpback powering up from the deep sees the ball against the light and gulps it down. A fin whale, in a burst of speed, envelops the shoal in a lunge. Called the ‘greyhounds of the sea’, fins can swim at 37kph. Clearly, a whale had engulfed the birds accidentally, found it had a mouthful of alien, feathery things and spat them out.

Colin explained that the first action of the whale upon taking in a fish shoal is to squeeze out the water through the baleen plates in its jaws. Then, it swallows the fish like a stream of living oil running down a plug-hole. The birds would have been drowned and crushed as the water was expelled. However, a single herring gull on the surface still showed signs of life.

Brought aboard, clearly in shock and shaking from fear and cold, it lay wrapped in a towel until, well recovered, we released it over the side. Swept away on the wake, I watched it through binoculars. No worse for its Jonas experience, it flapped its wings and took to the air.

A man who had driven from Dublin for the outing wondered should he remove the gannet’s head and present it to his mother, saying it was a Christmas goose. Scottish islanders hunted gannet which they called Solan Goose, and the early Christian monks on Skellig Michael harvested the squabs. However, we committed our snowy gannet to the sea.