You never forget your first (…whale)
I swear I looked down the long length of our 25-foot tag pole for what felt like minutes. The delicately positioned DTAG had disappeared from the end of the pole and the fin whale we had been chasing was descending below the water’s surface. Turning slowing, I holler back to the expectant eyes of the others on the boats and yell “Tag on, Garth.” I barely heard Dave, our intrepid PI and tag boat driver, yell back “Tag on, Wayne.”
[photo size=’large’ title=’Tag on!’ link=’http://superpod.ml.duke.edu/johnston/files/2011/09/tagon.jpg’ icon=’zoom’ lightbox=’image’]http://superpod.ml.duke.edu/johnston/files/2011/09/tagon.jpg[/photo]They say you will never forget your first whale. But I swear I hardly remembered it. In the end, it was all a blur. But what I know was that I laid the DTAG squarely and firmly on the fin whale’s dorsal ridge, right in front of the dorsal fin. The team now had its second deployment of the DTAG onto a fin whale of the season. And, personally, it was exhilarating and instinctual.
[photo size=’large’ title=’Tag on fin whale’ link=’http://superpod.ml.duke.edu/johnston/files/2011/09/taggagetwo.jpg’ icon=’zoom’ lightbox=’image’]http://superpod.ml.duke.edu/johnston/files/2011/09/taggagetwo.jpg[/photo]Stepping back, the day had been fantastic thus far. Visually, the Long Eddy—the oceanographic feature off the northern end of Isle Gran Manan that we are studying—was going off: gulls and shearwaters bickering back and forth over easy forage; northern gannets elegantly dive-bombing prey from the shallow depths; harbor porpoises playing with the boats as if they were dolphins on a bow wave. Our prey mapping team was radioing in good news at every turn. To top it all, there were a few individual fin whales we had sighted throughout the study area. Time to lay the tag on.
[photo size=’medium’ align=’right’ title=’Tag – good placement’ link=’http://superpod.ml.duke.edu/johnston/files/2011/09/taggage.jpg’ icon=’zoom’ lightbox=’image’]http://superpod.ml.duke.edu/johnston/files/2011/09/taggage.jpg[/photo]There had already been a few hours of delicate dancing: the whale would surface, we would chase, the whale would descend, and we would wait for another surfacing. The courtship had grown old. But from the moment Dave gunned the engines, I knew we must make this one different. The animal was on opposite side of a seabird aggregation foraging on a shallow prey layer—the bobbing birds already too full of krill and herring. We had already missed one opportunity to tag, we had to make this one different. I spent most of the approach attempting to conjure more tag pole from my hands. The whale was just too far away… until it wasn’t. And that’s when I straight laid my first tag on a whale.
Tag on, Garth.
[photo size=’large’ title=’Happy!’ link=’http://superpod.ml.duke.edu/johnston/files/2011/09/jmox.jpg’ icon=’zoom’ lightbox=’image’]http://superpod.ml.duke.edu/johnston/files/2011/09/jmox.jpg[/photo]