I Hate Whales

If you enjoy life and like to feel joy, NEVER EVER go on a whale watching cruise in Monterey Bay! Even now as I type, I need to hold a paper bag up to my mouth in case of nausea by memory, and I am virtually certain that various bodily systems have had their life expectancies reduced by several years because of my experience.



The excursion started out innocently enough. It was just Tyler and I - Kerri and Dylan lay near death in our cabin and encouraged us to go. The sun was beating down on us, there were no waves, and dolphins and sea otters literally escorted us to the mouth of the bay. Tyler and I stood on the outside deck and pointed joyously at seagulls and sailboats bobbing on the water - in a moment of weakness, I may have skipped along the deck.

Five minutes later, I was in the middle of The Perfect Storm. Here is a snapshot I took of our trip.


Seriously, our boat was bobbing up and down at least 30 degrees from side to side for the next hour and a half it took us to get to the whale migration path. The temperature turned from 80 degrees to 50 degrees immediately, so we went into the interior of the ship (and when I say ship I am giving the creaking, accursed vessel too much credit), along with lots of previously smiling tanktop clad ladies and their significant others. That was our home for the next miserable 4 hours.


Luckily, Tyler fell asleep in my arms for the next two hours. Unluckily, I was locked into place with a direct view toward a poor little Asian girl who started vomiting 10 minutes into the trip and continued for the remainder. Immediately, the weaker stomached members of our interior-seated posse began to lose their lunches into a garbage can that was passed around. A fortunate few were able to follow the crew members' mandate to run to the back of the boat and point your mouth over the railing if you felt nauseous. An unfortunate majority weren't able to make it and gave up their ghosts right there in the cabin. I have an iron stomach which has remained strong where others have fallen by the masses, but I began to swallow bile and take deep breaths about an hour in.

Half an hour later, we reached a whale utopia. When the overly-excited lady guide began screeching over the microphone that humpback whales were doing incredible displays of tails flapping the water and blowing geysers of water into the air, only half our group even cared enough to groan, get up, and limp their way outside the cabin. When she yelled "Look, a whale at our 2 o'clock," someone moaned "Screw whales!" back.

As for myself, with Tyler asleep across my lap, I never got up to look in the 45 minutes we bobbed up and down with only the one lady screaming at every sighting. I was busy doing mortal combat with my own stomach. Tyler woke up just before we left, so I weakly stood up from inside the cabin and snapped these pathetic pictures.



Then I collapsed back in a heap. I never had the energy to even point out whales to Tyler, so he thinks he was just on a boat ride.

As we left, the guide told us we had a two hour trip back to land. With this miserable thought, I ran outside onto the deck, leaving Tyler to his disbelief with an unsuspecting stranger, and I shared my lunch with the fish. For the next two hours, we enjoyed a wonderfully choreographed ballet of people running out in pairs, then groups of three, and in all sorts of wonderful combinations, to lean over the railing and commune with nature.

With Tyler starting to complain about a "tummy hurt", I took him outside to get some fresh air and we held on to each other for dear life in the cold wind, splashing water, and rocking boat. Literally 15 minutes from land, sweet land, the boat stopped and bobbed while the guide yelled "hey, there's another whale off to the port side!" One woman literally started screaming at the captain and the guides, pointing out the large numbers of guests who were curled up in fetal position or hanging off the railing with limp, bloodless hands. Miraculously, we started up again.

As I stumbled onto shore, I sent loving thoughts to our Viking predecessors, European explorers who found America, fishermen, and the Coast Guard for their contributions to my life. May they get paid more.