This past weekend I crossed one of my bucket-list items by taking my grandson, Ronnie, whale watching in Baja. It was quite an adventure, which started in a narrow fisherman's cove where we boarded a small fishing boat with an outboard motor. Now, we had to make to sea from a very steep beach, so the procedure is to be pushed into the water by fellow fishermen, and then gun the motor to have enough impulse to get over the breaking wave before the boat is tipped backward, so there was quite the adrenaline rush right at the start. We had come to a shallow coastal lagoon on the Pacific side of Baja, about four hours north of Los Cabos, because at this time of the year the Gray Whales are gathering for the long migration to their feeding grounds along the Bering Sea, a migration of more than 7,000 miles!
The migration gets going in fits and starts from January to March, so in February we got a sampling of the early and late waves. The early January wave consists mostly of adults and newly pregnant females, and the March wave is mostly of mother whales and their babies, who have taken a couple more months to build up their blubber stores. In February, then, we got to see females in estrus, males trying to copulate with the receptive females, and mamas and babies.
We saw some very cool behaviors, such as “spy hopping”, which is when a whale pops out its head vertically, just far enough to see what is going around. Note the presence of barnacles growing on the whale, which will become important in the last paragraph.
The other cool thing we saw was “breaching”, which apparently is just a whale’s way of having fun and making a big splash.
On a more serious note, the whales are here to get to the business on hand, which is mating. Now, I should note that the female whales are significantly larger than the male whales, and that they are nymphomaniacs, so when it comes to having sex they believe in whale-size orgies. Normally there will be a group of 4 to 6 males swimming around a female, patiently waiting their turn to put their “Pink Floyd” into her vagina. But she fully intends to enjoy herself in the process, so she cavorts with the hunk in turn, rotating her body and forcing the male to keep up with her (a real challenge given that he has nothing to grasp to). After a few gyrations she dumps that particular lover and goes for the next one!
But she can only have one calf, so apparently she has a vaginal barrier that she keeps zealously closed until she finds a guy she really likes, at which point she opens her “gates” and allows the sperm to enter her uterus and fertilize the egg. Was this the first, or the third, or the sixth of her lovers? Only she knows the answer to this one.
At the end, tired at last from the orgy, she floats belly up and in this way signals “the boys” that the party is over, and they can thus go sow their wild oats elsewhere.
I am not telling you what I heard from a third party. Oh no, we had front seats to the shenanigans of the very promiscuous lady, and at the end could see her wide belly resting in sexual contentment just a few feet from our boat. She will now gestate for 12 months, just about the time needed to swim all the way to the Aleutian Islands, eat an enormous amount of plankton (they are baleen whales), and come back in December to give birth. She will then take a year to rear her calf, after which she will once again become a sex goddess of the sea.
Now, back to the barnacles. Gray whales wear their barnacles like crusty mocos around their upper lips, and from time to time decide to get rid of them by rubbing against a suitable hard surface, like the hull of a boat! And so it was that this enormous whale decided that our little boat was the perfect surface to rub against, and we had the indescribable pleasure of scratching her lips as she moved up and down along the hull. At the beginning Ronnie was hesitant, but once he got over his initial fear he smiled broadly as he poked against the firm skin of the whale (imagine you are pushing against an overstuffed leather sofa … well, a wet overstuffed leather sofa). It was the coolest experience ever!
Eventually the whale got tired of the sport, made a quick turn, and with a big wave of its fluke dove into the waters of the lagoon.
Getting back to the beach was another adrenaline rush, again gunning the engine as fast as it would go to cut through the surf and jar to a halt against the packed beach sand. It was a fitting end to a remarkable tale.
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