It’s a drizzly grey morning with a ten knot ESE wind blowing and a surprisingly lumpy sea atop a 1.5 metre southerly swell. I’ve been paddling for about an hour and I’m just a few hundred metres east of Black Rock. There is no-one around, and with waves washing across my deck it’s one of those paddles when the sea feels dangerous and lonely and exhilarating all at the same time.
As I head back north around a headland, the swell picks up and the kayak surges forward, still no people, no boats, nobody but grey ocean and grey sky blending together on the horizon. And then I hear it, the familiar slap, slap, slap, and turning to the east, far off, I see a faint spout. Whales. I paddle northeast, the plumb bow of my kayak slapping over the waves. The whales are moving south, noisily, slap, slap, slap of the massive flippers on the sea. One after another, sometimes two at once, then a breach, and back to slap, slap, slap.
A half kilometre off the coast, I sit and watch. It is a mother and calf. The mother pec-slaps almost continually. Her flippers are huge, her breath noisy. The calf breaches, once, twice, fully out of the water showing a white, ridged underbelly. Me and the whales and the ceaseless shifting ocean.
