Are wales mammals or a country?
19 July 2017
Now I didn't know that there were two 4.45s in a day.......... until today, but that is what time I got up at in order to get to the 'A' pontoon in Noumea marina for 06.00 there were about a dozen others standing about and a few more turned up shortly afterwards. We were all invited aboard a rather large catamaran by the captain, pretty much as soon as we were all on we slipped our moorings and moved out. Then we were given a safety brief and told how the day would pan out. I then helped get the sails up and a bit of other housekeeping. We then all settled down to a very pleasant 3.5 hour sail down the coast of New Caledonia seeing lots of green vegetation and some magnificent mountains, the temperature very soon warmed up to about 26c degrees with wall to wall sunshine, yet again ( did I say it's winter down here yet?) any way I could feel the tension building as we went along. Then someone called up that they could see the 🐳 whales 🐳 that we had been looking for, so I pulls the binoculars out and could only just see them in the distance but at this stage nothing to write home about, 10 minutes later they were quite a bit closer and visible with the naked eye. ( so that is another point on my bucket list ticked off) we were now looking at two whales a male and a female, the skipper said they would be swimming up and down the area for a while and said that boats were not allowed to go near with engines running (so as not to stress them) but a couple of speed boats were ignoring this rule. The whales were diving down for around 7 minutes which increased the anticipation as to where they would resurface, my heart got faster as the time went bye. After around 40 minutes we got our best sight of the dat they both surfaced less than 30 m away, we did not see any breaching and only a few tail flukes just before they dove down again. We were with them for around 4 hours and for the last hour we watched the female stay on the surface and every so often the male surfaced, the funny thing was one of the women on the boat asked about the male and most of us just laughed. It turns out that she didn't hear the skipper explain how they procreate and what was happening. The journey back was just a nice speed so that we could mingle and discuss our best moment or the day. I met a couple of Aussies who were in their version of the NHS they were nice to speak to and passed the time away rather quickly. This was a special day for me and I believe for all the others who came on the trip. I am now sat in bed a very happy person