Whale(s) ho!

Whale(s) ho!
Originally uploaded by Alex Cameron.

17 January 2005, 2 p.m. local time

PARADISE VILLAGE MARINA, NAYARIT, MEXICO

Even in Paradise, Mondays come around and today is a writing day (for consulting jobs) so we can pay the rent on our casa in Sacramento.

The work, however, is this afternoon, now that we are back from a morning Banderas Bay tour aboard a 50-foot power boat called 'Mi Amor.' Mi Amor just replaced one of its transmissions (at a cost of $6,000) and the captain wanted to take the boat out for a test run and to check the bay for whales. Smart idea, this going out for a test run before making a major passage. Not all the people here are that smart.

We traveled straight out from Paradise Village and found two pods of whales, surrounded, of course, by pangas and tour boats. I guess none of the people on the tour boats have ever seen the film 'Moby Dick.' We shot a half-hour of video, some of which I'll upload later this week.

The photo with this blog is from about two weeks ago when Sabbatical was treated to a viewing of cavorting whales for nearly an hour during a tour of the bay with our newest crew member, Kathleen, and her family from Boston and Chicago. Kathleen helped Dustin bring Sabbatical south from Mazatlan in early December to deliver the ship here to Paradise Village. (You will see her picture in a future blog)

The whales are all over the bay this month and always put on quite a show. Unlike the U.S., where approaching these behemoths is probably a felony, the Mexican pangas zoom up close to get a good look, the spouts of the whales sometimes soaking the panga passengers. We usually shoot video of the whales, instead of stills, so we can catch the wild sounds they make. One our trip two weeks ago, two whales used their flukes to slap the water -- hard. You could hear the sound a mile away and it looked like two teenagers at a beach splashing one another. Maybe that's exactly what they were doing.

Today the sound of the whales spouting was pretty impressive, too.

Now it's time to log on to SFgate.com and other news sites to get ready to draft some stories about California.

But I better steady myself with a Pacifico, first.

Hasta manana.

mjf