The other day, I had a wildlife encounter that most people will never get a chance to experience. It was an amazing encounter… but as it turned out, also a little gross.

For those of you here who don't know me, aside from being a former Tripawd dad, I'm also a sergeant with the Orange County Sheriff's Department in California, currently assigned to our Marine Operations bureau, which patrols all three county harbors and 48 miles of county coastline. I've been there for over four years now, and in that time, I've encountered my fair share of marine wildlife – many species of dolphins, whales, seals & sea lions, fish & sharks, etc. But in many ways, the grand prize of them all is seeing blue whales, the largest animals ever to exist on earth. They migrate past our coastline in mid to late summer, and a quirk of local underwater geography makes it possible to see them much closer to land than normal. There's a submarine canyon that starts very close to shore off the coast of Newport Beach, and quickly drops to depths of over 1000 feet. That means blue whales are comfortable coming in closer to shore there, since the water is still as deep as they like it. So in that one area, the chances of seeing one of these rare creatures is much higher than normal.

Last Thursday, I was on a patrol run about 1½ miles off the Newport Beach coast when I saw a blue whale surface about 200 yards away from me.  They have one of the tallest blow geysers of all whales when they exhale – it shoots up to twenty feet into the air, and makes them easy to see when they surface. I slowed the boat down just in time to see it lift its fluke (tail fin) and dive.  I’ve encountered blue whales enough times to have a rough understanding of their swim patterns, so I knew that once they dive, you won’t see them again for several minutes.  It appeared to be heading upcoast, so I took the boat a little further out and repositioned myself near where it seemed most likely to come up again.  I figured if I was lucky, it would come up twenty-five or fifty yards away from me, hopefully west of me so I’d have the sunlight at my back and get a clear picture with my telephoto lens (I always carry a camera with me in case of unforeseen encounters like this).

I waited around for several minutes with no sign of the whale.  I was starting to think it had made a deep dive into the submarine canyon and wasn’t going to come up again for a while, and that I might as well go about my business.  As I was taking one last look for it, I heard a LOUD explosion of breath directly behind me. Blue whales exhale loud enough to be heard two miles away, so it sounded like a thunderclap and startled the hell out of me since I’d been concentrating on staring so hard in the other direction.  I turned around and saw the whale had made a hard left and headed out to sea during its last dive, and surfaced only fifty or sixty feet away from my boat! 

When they come up to breathe, blue whales tend to exhale and take a breath, go underwater for several seconds, then surface and repeat the process four or five times before lifting their flukes for the actual dive.  I turned off my boat's engine so it wouldn’t scare the whale, so every time it rose back up, it came closer and closer to me.  It got to the point that I couldn’t even fit the entire whale into the camera frame.  It's hard to say exactly how big the whale was, but I’d estimate somewhere between seventy and eighty feet – they seldom get larger than eighty-five in the northern hemisphere.

When the whale came up for its last breath before diving, it couldn’t have been more than twenty-five or thirty feet away from my boat (the three pictures below are from that last breath before its final dive).  Their exhalations put massive amounts of mist into the air, and in this case, the wind carried that mist right to my boat.  Far be it from me to malign a such a majestic creature, but the word "stench" hardly covers what hit me like a punch in the nose. The closest thing I can compare it to is the time when I was still on street patrol, and I had to divert traffic around a fully loaded garbage truck that caught fire on a hot summer day. Imagine that reek, and you'll have some idea of what suddenly assaulted my nostrils. Whales are apparently unfamiliar with the concept of breath fresheners. And judging by the feel and eventual dried crustiness of what landed on me, I’m pretty sure that mist was made up of more than just water.  While this is the closest I’ve ever been to a whale and one of the most amazing experiences of my life, I have mixed feelings about being boogered by one.

When that monster lifted its tail out of the water to dive, it was easily taller than my boat, and I'd estimate the fluke was twenty feet across.  It could have swatted me and my boat aside like a fly if it wanted to, and was easily close enough to do so. Blue whales are harmless, of course, but even knowing that, it's still unnerving to be that close to a living creature that unimaginably massive. Then it slipped beneath the surface with hardly a ripple, leaving me slightly dazed by the encounter, and also slightly slimy.  I still can't believe I was that close to a whale.

But if it ever happens again, I hope I’m upwind next time.