Getting the hump while whale watching off Courtmacsherry

Courtmacsherry is now the mecca for visiting cetacean viewers from everywhere on earth.

A breaching humpback whale taken on Sunday, June 6 off the coast of Courtmacsherry, Co Cork. Picture: Christopher O'Sullivan

Great whale watching off Courtmacsherry last week, humpbacks breaching, fin whales feeding, minkies cruising! Unfortunately, I missed it all...

I’d been at sea on the same Atlantic Whale and Wildlife Tour boat earlier and spent over three hours scanning the seascape and not seen a thing. The dolphins cavorting around and ahead of the boat, their full, sleek bodies clearing the water, drew squeals of excitement from visitors – inland souls at sea – but I was looking for the iconic sight of a humpback whale with its cupid-lips of a tail high above the surface, or even its whole body rocketing straight up, skyward, en plein air, my familiar village or headlands set in the view behind it. But this was not to be.

They had been there, the massive whales, the day before, and they were there again only hours after I’d come ashore. The previous afternoon, doughty anglers from Holland, Belgium and elsewhere had been treated to many sightings, for them a spectacular ‘added extra’ as they powered out aboard Mark Gannon’s 18m boat in search of big game, the bluefin tuna some over 70Kg (200lb) passing on migration 40 miles out to sea.

Damien Enright: 'Whale watching and basking-shark sightings between the Old Head of Kinsale and Galley Head have been consistently good all summer.'

On my morning trip, we’d seen rafts and straight-line columns of guillemots on the surface, albeit looking a bit ropy in transitional plumage, and small groups of gannets. Keen-eyed Hank the Dutchman, Mark’s First Mate, saw storm petrels, tiny black birds, dainty as winged ballerinas, dancing with fluttering wings inches above the wave tops. I didn’t see them, but could imagine it... A single, lazy minke whale revealed itself for a split second before disappearing into the depths. Apparently, it surfaced again 300m away.

The news of what I’d missed on the afternoon trip was conveyed to me by an excited Dutchman who said the humpback performances he’d seen were Oscar-winning — they’re always good, but they were very good — and the boat came alongside a fin whale over 20m long (60ft) that lay languidly on the surface after a feeding foray beneath a cloud of hysterical gulls and plunge-diving gannets bickering over leftover scraps in the ball of sprats attacked by it and six of its giant companions.

Like many Dutchmen and Belgians now in the village, he has been coming to fish with Courtmacsherry Sea Angling for the last 30 years, missing only the Covid intervals. He showed me photos of local families over the decades, the album on his phone a pictorial register of local people, some still living but no longer the boys or girls they once were, some since passed away.

It was an irony that I’d almost missed the morning boat but hadn’t quite! I’d booked to leave the pier at 10am but arrived minutes late to find the boat already moving away. Patricia, Mark’s wife, kindly said she’d alert her husband and he’d reverse in and pick me up, no bother — or would I prefer to wait and go out in the afternoon at 2.30? No, thanks, I’ll go now, I said. Oh, that I’d picked the afternoon!

Since Mark and Patricia decided to diversify into whale watching in 2018, while continuing to offer angling trips, the business has grown exponentially and Courtmacsherry, convenient to Cork City and Kinsale, is now the mecca for visiting cetacean viewers from everywhere on earth. Fellow-trippers were couples from Holland, Germany, and inland Ireland, and a South African Indian family that clearly enjoyed the trip immensely.

Whale watching and basking-shark sightings between the Old Head of Kinsale and Galley Head have been consistently good all summer, but such sightings are always a serendipity, and the visitor may be as unlucky as I was. However, there is always a joy to the excursion, the dolphins, the birds, and the coastline seen from the sea. One is transported from one’s feet on the ground, and the everyday. The rhythm of water beneath the hull, and the sounds and smells of the ocean are surely welcome. Few poems express it as well as Emily Dickinson’s “Exultation is the going. Of an inland soul to sea...” which I’ve quoted previously.

I marvelled at how our captain Mark and his mate Hank could stand unsupported, feet wide apart, on the mid-deck hatch cover or the rolling roof of the wheelhouse, binoculars held to their eyes searching the sea. I almost fell over looking at them. They assured me it was a calm day.

On sailing ships the crewman on watch was perched in the crow’s-nest atop the main mast, so called because Vikings apparently carried a raven or crow in a cage secured there. When they lost their bearings, they released the bird and followed the route it instinctively took to the nearest land.