I've always been intrigued by whales, even more so after reading Moby Dick in high school. Then I signed on a three masted barque that was rigged out as a Nantucket whaler. Our skipper was Alan Villiers, who at the time was one of the most famous sailors alive. Years earlier it was he who skippered the Mayflower II across the Atlantic to where it now is moored in Plymouth, Massachusetts. In the 1930s he became the last captain to skipper a full-rigged ship around the horn from West to East. That ship, the Joseph Conrad, is now berthed in Mystic, Connecticut. I've been aboard them both.
Some day I'll have to tell the story of my Pacific crossing with Captain Villiers. He ran the ship as if we were back in the 19th Century. It was a great experience but not one that I'd want to repeat.
Although I have seen quite a few whales during my various times at sea, the grandest experience of them all was when I was the executive officer and navigator of the USS Apache, and we were towing a floating dry dock, the USS White Sands, which had the bathyscaphe Trieste berthed in it. We were several hundred miles off the coast of California.
It was a quiet Sunday afternoon, and I had just finished taking the noon Sun sight when something far ahead of us caught my eye. It looked to me like two huge logs were floating in our path. So I immediately gave the order to come to starboard. With our tow far behind us, and moving at only about four knots, I knew that we still would be lucky to not hit those logs or get them entangled in our tow line. Fortunately, we began our turn in time, and as we came closer, our forward lookout shouted out that they weren't longs, they were whales!
The timing of our turn couldn't have been better, for we were able to come parallel to two enormous blue whales and then steam on alongside them, less than fifty yards off our port side. I left the pilot house and stood out on the bridge to get a better view and discovered that we had come upon a mother and her almost fully grown calf. They were just floating there, enjoying the sun. I don't know how big they actually were, but it seemed as if they were half the length of our ship, with the mother being closest to us.
For a moment, I thought about rushing into the chart house to grab my camera and take their picture, but as we came abreast of them, the mother whale and I seemed to lock eyes. I was mesmerized by that giant eye looking straight into mine and was frozen to that spot on the wing of the bridge. I wanted to go get my camera, but I simply couldn't break eye contact with such a beautiful blue whale. That experience was, without any doubt, the greatest moment of all my time at sea.
The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1
You may download a free copy of it at
https://lorenzohagerty.com/freebooks/
I have placed this book directly into the Public Domain.