Whale watching

It was so lucky we could reschedule our whale-watching trip when we had such rainy, foggy days! I don't suppose we could have seen anything beyond the boat in the fog, and we would have been so miserable and wet! As it turned out, the clouds cleared in early afternoon as we drove up the coast to Les Escoumins, and by the time we arrived the weather was sunny and clear!

I was surprised when I found out there were whales in the St. Lawrence River at all! Apparently they sometimes (rarely!) swim all the way even to Quebec City, but they love the estuary area up where the St. Lawrence widens and the fresh water from the river and salt water from the ocean start to mix. (You can see the fjord at Tadoussac, a little southwest of the red dot here. Whales and dolphins like that spot too.) I guess there are lots of plankton and other things to eat in these areas because of the turbulence of the mixing water.

The river seems really wide near Les Escoumins (it seemed like ocean to us even from the boat—we couldn't see the other side of the river) but as you can see in the map that it widens a lot more as you go farther northeast/ downstream toward the ocean!

Anyway, various factors including the salt/freshwater mix apparently makes this one of the best place to see marine mammals in the world! I really hoped we would see some, but it seemed fun even to have the chance of it! Such an interesting geographical spot!

To get across that Saguenay fjord at Tadoussac, you have to take a ferry. It's a short ride, only 15 minutes or so, but fun for us because we love ferries! I don't know if we had ever been on one before this trip, but we went in Maine to the Fox Islands and have now gone on several more! We will be Ferry Regulars before you know it.

It was still a little foggy, but out in the water of the fjord, we saw something leaping and diving! We didn't know what it was, but it was white and sinuous! Malachi and I prefer to think it was a beluga, but Sam thinks it must have been a dolphin. (But a white dolphin? It was SO white.)

Little flippy tail

After the ferry, we drove a little farther up the coast (river bank, I guess, not coast—but it feels like coast). A very pretty drive. Beautiful, in fact.

We were so happy the weather was good! We had optimistically brought a picnic and were happy to actually be able to eat it outside!

While we waited for the boat, we played and explored around on this very beautiful ridge overlooking the river.

Gus had very important things to tell Clementine

And very important places to show her!

Evie waiting for the boat (somehow we convinced Clementine not to bring Evie on the boat, which was good because I had terrifying visions of Evie falling into the water and being lost forever).

I was afraid we would all be freezing on the boat, so we brought coats and gloves and hats. Then the place that led our whale cruise had their own coats for us to wear too! We were glad. It was still pretty chilly out there on the water with the wind on our faces, even when we were bundled up! They kept saying the water was 3º—Celsius, of course, which I STILL don't know intuitively. I learned just this moment when I looked it up that that's about 37º F. Pretty cold!

Gus and Clementine were quite pleased to be so geared up.

The boat was big, but not huge! I was happy we got to be down close to the water where we could see better.

They let the little kids sit in the very front! Great view from there.

Right away we went out and saw a humpback whale! This company we went with said they "guaranteed" whale sightings, so I thought we'd probably see one, but I didn't know we'd see many of them, or that we'd really be able to tell what they were. But we really could tell they were whales. They leaped out of the water sometimes like this (hard to catch with the camera than with your eye, of course!), and it looked so cool! You could tell they were BIG. Really big.

They get all kinds of whales here. 13 different species. (I told the kids that interesting fact as we were driving to the whale cruise. Malachi said, "Is that supposed to make us feel better? So if we don't see any whales we can at least know we didn't see thirteen different kinds of them?" Hah.) There are even blue whales regularly! I would have loved to see one of those, but we didn't. There were some reported sightings of blue whales in other spots on the day we went, though, and several days surrounding it. So we could have seen one. (As Malachi would no doubt be consoled by.)

We saw humpbacks and porpoises and…some other kind, I think. Plus whatever it was we saw in the fjord. I never in my life thought I would get to see whales in the wild!!

My favorite thing was when the whales would dive down deeper into the water and we'd get to see their tails. After seeing a tail, our guide told us you usually don't see the whale again for ten or fifteen minutes. They can stay down below for a long time! Even up to an hour or so!

How, you ask? I wondered that too:

Whales have a very efficient respiratory system where their lungs can make the most out of each breath, giving them the ability to stay underwater for hours at a time. For perspective, humans breathe around 12-20 times per minute when resting, but only absorb 5% of the oxygen in a single breath. Compare this to a whale who can absorb as much as 90% of the oxygen in each breath. This means that a whale acquires much more oxygen than a human in a single breath to start with.

Whales’ lungs have the ability to store oxygen in a special protein found in muscles called myoglobin. They also conserve energy underwater by slowing their heart rate and limiting blood supply to only a few organs.

Another interesting thing is that each whale's tail has a different pattern of white and black on it, which makes them distinguishable by their tails almost like a human fingerprint. When this whale dove down, the guide immediately said, "Oh, there's ____" (Flippy, or whatever its name was) (it wasn't Flippy) because he recognized which tail it was.

Luckily the whales were big enough and close enough that even the little kids could spot them. They were so excited!

Toothy (you'll be pleased to know that this other front tooth finally fell out, after this trip)

Daisy and Junie were very cold when we got going fast!

It was so pretty to be out on the water with the sky and the clouds so many shades of grey and blue.

Sometimes we could see the whales spouting, and that was so cool! It was hard to get a picture of it. You can kind of see it here. Just a big spray of mist going vertically up into the air. In person, it was unmistakeable.