2016 Jan 31
Henry Wismayer wrote to the Wall Street Journal on how a lazy beach getaway became an impromptu safari when the prospect of spotting a blue whale arised.
IT WAS SIX A.M. when the procession of headlights began to pierce the predawn darkness at the dockyard. Bleary-eyed tourists from all along Sri Lanka’s south coast were arriving at the harbor in Mirissa for a chance to spot a blue whale, thought to be the largest animal ever to have inhabited the earth.
My motives for heading to Mirissa were different. I was just doing what many first-time visitors to Sri Lanka’s southern coast do almost instinctively: looking for a quiet beach on which to achieve no goals whatsoever. Mirissa appeared a likely spot to find one.
Ever since the Tamil Tigers’ 30-year insurgency was crushed in 2009, tourism along Sri Lanka’s south coast has been on the rise. For now, though, Mirissa has escaped the large-scale development that is walling off its neighboring towns behind rows of resorts. Three-and-a-half hours from Sri Lanka’s capital, Colombo, by train, Mirissa still exudes a laid-back vibe that draws backpackers and other independent travelers happy to avoid the package-tour crowds.
Soon after I’d arrived and checked into an inexpensive guesthouse, I slipped easily into a slothful rhythm. I spent my first two days at the beach—a two minute walk away—reading and jumping the waves along the ocher arc fringed with gangly coconut palms.
But I found Mirissa most beguiling at dusk, when the fairy-lights coiled around tree-trunks at restaurants projected constellations onto plastic tables, and staffers at the reggae bars lit bonfires on the sand. Beachside restaurants loaded small boats with seafood—snapper, king prawn, dory, tuna—and placed them on the sand so diners could take their pick from the day’s catch and have it taken straight to the kitchens for grilling.
You needn’t spend much time in Mirissa to see that the ocean there is superabundant. Immediately to the east, off Dondra Head, where a chalk-white lighthouse marks Sri Lanka’s southernmost cape, nutrient-rich waters draw krill, the tiny crustaceans that are the main food source for blue whales. The krill also attract schools of smaller fish, which in turn lure bigger predators: Sperm whales, pilot whales and dolphins make regular appearances. But the blue whale, I discovered, is without question the headliner of the aquatic spectacular that takes place just offshore. (Blue whales can also be spotted in California, the Sea of Cortez off Mexico, and Canada’s St. Lawrence River.)
The gravitational pull they exert on visitors to southern Sri Lanka is not without problems: Locals complained to me that new tour operators, unregulated and, in too many cases, uncompliant with the rules for safe whale-watching, are springing up all the time. And I had my own misgivings about harassing an endangered creature that seems to do its best to avoid humans.
But as someone who spent his childhood enraptured by museum skeletons of dinosaurs, mastodons and giant sloths, I was unable to resist the idea of seeing a big blue—measuring up to a hundred feet long and weighing up to 200 tons, with an aorta big enough to swim through. To me, the blue whale had an almost mythical quality by virtue of its elusiveness and its incomparable size. I decided I couldn’t leave without seeing one.
Which is why, on my third morning in Mirissa, I found myself down at the dockyard sipping coffee and thumbing through an encyclopedia of Sri Lanka’s marine wildlife, while my fellow day-trippers congregated outside in the orange glow of sunrise.
I’d picked up the book—and the coffee—from the office of Mirissa Water Sports, the company which pioneered whale-watching tours here 10 years ago, and has since acquired a reputation for causing minimal stress to the endangered whales. The auguries for the day ahead were good. On the wall outside the office, a signboard declared that between two and 10 blue whales had been spotted on each of the last 10 days.
Outside, the pier was abuzz. The smell of fish combined with the tang of the ocean was wafting over from the dock where fishermen were haggling over the night’s haul, displayed on the concrete in a glistening patchwork of flank and fin.
As excited whale-watchers queued up to board the boats, I was surprised to read that, until relatively recently, few people even knew the whales were here. Only after a World Wildlife Fund-sponsored research vessel named the Tulip spent two years cataloging the country’s megafauna in the early ’80s did news of Sri Lanka’s whales take a more concrete form than fishermen anecdotes.
Soon we were motoring out into the bay. Our fiberglass boat was around 40 feet long, with rows of seats on the lower deck and a viewing platform above, where a crew of three spotters stood sentinel beneath a plastic awning.
The ocean swelled as we nosed toward Dondra Head. For the rest of the morning the boat pitched in the chop, crashing resolutely over bow-waves sent our way by the hulking container ships on the horizon, slicing through one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world.
I was worried that the rough seas would spoil the odds of a sighting, but one of the spotters reassured me. “Don’t worry,” he said, “you don’t need calm seas to spot a blue whale. When they surface to exhale, they send waterspouts shooting up to 30 feet into the air.”
After a quiet first hour, the ocean came to life. At one point we had spinner dolphins leaping in arcs at our bow, a group of obsidian-black pilot whales cutting across our path and dozens of flying fish erupting from the water like explosions of quicksilver. “Too much centrifugal force up here,” harrumphed one British man to no one in particular, both hands clasped on his telephoto lens. A group of Dutch girls, their hangovers suddenly forgotten, let out a collective squeal of delight.
Then I heard a cry from the bow that recalled the whalers of old: “Whale! One o’clock! Far!” For a while, no one saw what the eagle-eyed spotter had spied. Then a sudden vaporous cloud erupted from the water, plum ahead; two minutes later an enormous hump that could only be a blue whale appeared. We chugged deferentially forward.
The first thing that grabs you when you approach a blue whale is its vivid color. The blue tinge to its skin appears just beneath the surface of the water as a dazzling ultramarine. All that could be seen of our whale, when we neared him, was the blowhole and the comparatively puny dorsal. But the shimmering blue shadow gradually revealed its true footprint—at least twice as long as our boat.
For a while it lingered 100 feet off our starboard side, its huge body rising and falling as it filled its 5,000-liter lungs. Then it arched, a whole island on the move, until its vast flukes broke clear of the water, dripping a curtain of pearls. Then, with the merest ripple, it was gone, down back into the blue.
This article was first published on the Wall Street Journal
