My obsession with mammoth sea creatures began with a manatee. On a spring-break trip to Belize 10 years ago, I spent an afternoon snorkeling with my husband off the palm-lined northeast shore of Ambergris Caye. We’d trailed soaring eagle rays, batted away inquisitive, pucker-lipped angelfish and maybe even spotted a turtle, although it might have been a crab. My husband had just climbed back into the kayak we’d moored off the beach, and just before I joined him, I put my face in the water one more time.
A manatee was watching me, from about 10 metres away. Its body was oblong and lumpy, a slab of dough that hadn’t been rolled out, and its broad paddle of a tail swayed up and down in the drift. It stared at me with a look that seemed curious, but not surprised. “Oh, another one of those spindly shallow-breathers,” I imagined it thinking. “Might as well go have a look.” And then, unlike the wary rays that had tipped their wings and banked away at the sight of us, the manatee swam toward me. It was bigger than I’d expected, I realized with growing alarm – probably three metres long – with a girth that made it look like a small dirigible or a submarine. It came so close I could have touched it.
There was a grace to it, despite its inelegance. It could have summoned the force of its one-tonne weight, slammed me with its powerful, charcuterie-platter tail. The fact that it glided past, flippers carefully tucked, watching me all the while, captivated me. I had a sense that this strange, ungainly creature was allowing me a glimpse of something, granting me entry into a world we thimble-lunged humans don’t belong in. I felt small and inadequate and grateful. And I wanted to feel that way again, with something even bigger.
I’ve been chasing whales ever since. In Canada, one of the best places to experience them is Tadoussac, Que. The small, scenic village at the junction of the St. Lawrence and Saguenay rivers sees as many as 13 species pass through each year, including some of the so-called great whales – the biggest of the big – from 10-metre-long minkes and 15-metre humpbacks to the unfathomably immense blue whale, which can measure more than 30 metres and weigh 200 tonnes.
On a good day in summer or early fall, those whales are everywhere. When our family camped there in the summer of 2022 on a tent site on the shore of the St. Lawrence, that vast river looked the way medieval and Renaissance mapmakers often depicted the ocean: full of waving fins and flapping tails. We ate dinner on the rocks by the water, and soon lost count of all the whales – minkes, mainly, although I liked to think there might be a blue cruising past, just beneath the surface. That first night in our tent, we went to sleep listening to them breathing, great gulps of air rushing out their blowholes with a rumbling, jet-plane whoosh.
The next day, as we clambered into kayaks, I was hoping a whale might surface next to us. I’d seen stories online of up-close encounters, and trusted, rightly or wrongly, that a whale would be just as hospitable as my manatee. But in Tadoussac, they kept their distance. We saw plenty on the water – again, mainly minkes, swimming for a while at the surface, then arching their backs and diving deep – and later, belugas on the Saguenay, although we needed binoculars to distinguish them from cresting whitecaps. Most reasonable people would have described our visit as spectacular – we’d seen dozens of whales, many of them less than 10 metres away. But I craved a closer look.
I got it last July in Churchill, Man., summer home to about 3,000 belugas. We were kayaking again, this time on the Churchill River, and the water was full of bulbous, bobbing white heads. Sailors often call them the “canaries of the sea,” and later that day, on a second tour in a Zodiac, we heard why. Our guide lowered a hydrophone into the water, and we listened to a high-pitched chorus of whistles, thrums and chirrups on a speaker. The belugas were talking, and it didn’t seem too much of a stretch to assume we were at least one of the topics of conversation.
Some of the belugas had shown no interest in us when we’d paddled past them – and when they didn’t, we were careful to leave them alone – but many approached us and swam alongside our boats. Our 15-year-old shrieked in delight as a sleek white whale took up a position by his paddle. “He’s still here, he’s still here,” our son kept calling out. “He’s staying with me.”
Our guide had told us belugas are attracted to the bubbles our paddles made, but they seemed drawn to what was happening above the waterline, too. Just before our excursion ended, I noticed a white glimmer. I kept paddling, willing the beluga to stay. As it swam alongside my kayak, it turned to one side to get a better look at me, its curved beak looking for all the world like a smile.
It’s easy to anthropomorphize. I try to resist that – we can’t know what a whale thinks, or even if it can think in a way we might recognize. But I collect the stories. Of big-brained sperm whales that share language and speak to each other in distinctive, clicking dialects. Of the orca mom that swam in apparent mourning for 17 days with the dead carcass of her calf. Of the humpback who saved the whale scientist from an imminent shark attack, one of numerous accounts of humpbacks demonstrating what appears to be altruistic behaviour. And I wonder what we’ll lose if we manage to drive these species into extinction.
