Siren Song of the Whales

Norm Cole watched with ill-disguised frustration as his armada of inflatable boats set off for the day’s hunt without him.

Methodically, he fiddled with the ignition switch, the choke, then the spark plugs of the 40-horsepower engine on his Zodiac skiff. Nothing. His three sleepy-eyed passengers began to fidget. He tried switching fuel tanks. The engine responded with a roar.

Within moments, Cole was churning full throttle down the channel of this sprawling, silt-laden bay on Mexico’s Pacific Coast, steering straight for a ring of white geysers on the horizon. As he approached, he cut the engine. Silence, except for the screech of sea gulls and the gentle current lapping against the rubber boat.

Suddenly, a whoooosh echoed through the air. Cole and his crew whipped around to see a misty plume, then a pair of blowholes and the barnacled back of a massive gray whale break the surface less than 10 feet away. New blows resonated as a second whale, then a mother and baby circled.

“This must be the Whale Freeway!” shouted Cole, a modern-day Captain Ahab unsure which direction to aim his camera.

When a dappled white and gray whale thrust its 40-ton body into the air in a series of five “breaches” barely 100 yards off the bow, the 46-year-old Laguna Beach biologist grinned.

“I could watch this all day,” he said between camera clicks. “This is why I keep coming back.”

Call it the siren song of the whale.

These largest of Earth’s creatures have fascinated humans since the days of Aristotle, who first observed that they have lungs and breath air like land animals. Herman Melville burned them into the collective consciousness with his 1851 novel “Moby Dick,” an epic clash of good and evil, a chronicle of man bent on destroying a force of nature.

Hunted to near extinction after it was discovered that whole cities could be lighted with oil made from their blubber, most whales now are protected by international treaty. Their survival became a rallying cry for the dawning environmental movement in the 1960s.

Now, their mystique lures thousands of people who spend thousands of dollars each year on pilgrimages to whaling grounds around the world.

Mecca for enthusiasts is Baja California, where the most accessible whale species, California grays, migrate 6,000 miles from their Arctic feeding waters to mate and give birth each winter in Mexican bays and lagoons.

They come to see, to touch, to study. Most arrive on tour ships. Others join researchers like Cole, an Orange Coast College professor who brings 20 or so assistants each winter to help collect photographic data on gray whales.

Some of Cole’s helpers want to commune with creatures they believe may have intelligence rivaling man’s. Others like “roughing it” in Baja. Once they’ve seen a “friendly” whale rub its barnacles against their boat, or touched the pocked, velvety skin of a young calf, though, they return again and again.

“Whales really seem to bring out the emotion in people,” mused aviation photographer Joy Frazer as Cole’s gray boat plied the greenish waters of Magdalena Bay. The 32-year-old from Oxford, England, had planned the rest of her year around this, her fourth sojourn to Baja because the desire to see whales has become “a total addiction.”

“They’re so huge, but they are so elusive. They let you see only a little bit of themselves. You can only infer how they live. . . . They’re like extraterrestrials living on another planet beneath the waves.”

Indeed, whales have been elevated to near cult status in some circles where they are considered intelligent, peace loving and communicative.

This idea hit mainstream pop culture in the movie, “Star Trek IV,” which featured aliens that communicate in the song of whales. They threaten to destroy Earth unless its oceans are repopulated with whales, which were killed off by thoughtless humans in the 20th Century.

“Let’s face it, men in boats have given the whale a hard time,” said Holly Jaffe, a Capistrano Beach office manager making her second trip with Cole. “Not only have they survived in their peaceful way, but they have forgiven us.”

The gray whale’s odyssey begins in October off Alaska and Siberia. Daylight grows short, the food scarce. Colder winds herald the onset of winter storms and shifting ice floes. Pregnant cows depart first to ensure they make the 8- to 10-week trip to warm, protected Baja lagoons before bearing their calves.

Along the 5,000- to 7,000-mile journey, they fast, living on blubber stored in summer feasts on bottom-dwelling crustaceans and plankton. Some sightings, however, suggest they may feed if they stumble upon something tasty.

Gray whales steam south at about 85 to 100 miles a day. As they round the California coast near Monterey, 21,000 were counted this year, marking the first time grays have surpassed their pre-whaling numbers of 15,000 to 20,000 in the 1840s.

Once in Mexican waters, whales head for three main areas to mate and bear their young: Scammon’s Lagoon, about midway down the Baja coast; San Ignacio Lagoon, and sprawling Magdalena Bay.

Long before the whales sense the change in seasons, Cole begins preparing for his two-week winter journey. In July, he files a research request with Mexico. In September, he takes applications for research assistants. Food crews are appointed, major camping gear assembled, color slide film purchased in bulk.

Finally, just before 6 p.m. on Feb. 21, a caravan of four-wheel drive trucks pulls out of a Capistrano Beach driveway. Citizens-band radios securely fastened, campers and trucks packed to the gunwales, the second wave of 10 research assistants are Baja bound.

Steve Schott, a Laguna Beach dentist and radio man in the lead Toyota camper, earns groans with his CB rendition of the “Rawhide” TV series theme: “Rollin’ rollin’ rollin’ . . . “

Azad Booker, 41, a Capistrano Beach construction contractor, takes second position, in his new silver Toyota 4-Runner. Carol Paquette, 45, a biologist from Costa Mesa, is last in her light blue Nissan Pathfinder.

This year, they are headed for Magdalena Bay--and no one is happy. It will take an extra half-day or more of driving to get there. And it will not have “friendlies,” the approachable whales first documented in San Ignacio Lagoon in 1975.

Cole and his group have gone to San Ignacio Lagoon almost every year since 1979. But with the Mexican government tightening access to the protected lagoons, Scammon’s and San Ignacio, permits have become harder to get.

When this year’s permit did not arrive before he and the first group left on Feb. 16, it was decided that the two groups would rendezvous at Magdalena Bay, where there is no restriction on fishing or tourism during the winter whale season. They would still take photographs and meticulously cross-reference them. But none would be added to Cole’s 5,000 color slides of San Ignacio whales.

Still, there would be whales. That’s what counted.

Said Paquette, an avid scuba diver, bird-watcher and botanist, and a veteran of past Cole expeditions: “I wouldn’t do this for anything else but whales.”

At the Mexican border, there is a hitch. Skip Lauderbaugh, 36, a Newport Beach woodworking instructor driving the lead car, is stopped and sent to a secondary inspection area. Booker is too. Words are exchanged. The Mexican border guard tells him he is not wanted in Mexico. Panic sets in.

Booker said later he had simply rolled his eyes when the official asked if he was carrying guns. Soon, it is clear that no one cares to inspect these scientifically stuffed vehicles. Everyone is on the road again.

Near midnight, the caravan stops in San Quintin. Tents are pitched on the dunes as a heavy fog rolls in.

At sunrise, everyone repacks their wet, sandy gear. Bran and blueberry muffins are passed around. People pray in vain for a cup of hot coffee.

To the south, the two-lane Highway 1 winds inland to the high desert, a landscape of hardy cacti and plants that make do with the occasional storm and moisture borne by sea breezes. There is agave, citron and barrel cactus, its fire-plug shape crowned in flaming red thorns.

The caravan climbs higher still, where angular rust and black formations mark ancient lava flows. Carpets of purple, yellow and white wildflowers bloom crazily on either side of the highway, a testament to the unseasonally heavy rainfall that has descended on Baja this winter.

Towns and villages fly by. The caravan stops only for gas and to grab sandwiches and cold drinks from ice chests.

Near midnight, 10 weary travelers pitch camp next to a fish-processing factory in Puerto Lopez Mateos, a village along a saltwater estuary in Magdalena Bay where fishing and whale-watching tours seem to be the chief industries.

At dawn, villagers arrive to await American tourists who will pay to whale-watch in pongas, high-sided motor boats. The research caravaners wait for Cole and his motor boats to cross the channel to get them. But a fog lies thick on the bay. Everyone paces.

By 10 a.m. the gray shroud has lifted. Cole comes to ferry the group a quarter-mile across the water to his campground on a sand-spit island sheltering the bay. It is a choice spot of shrub-covered dunes beside a stand of mangrove trees.

Cole tells the newcomers that they encountered a friendly mother and calf a day earlier. So spirits are high as the inflatable flotilla sets out under a bright blue sky speckled with paw-print clouds.

Magnificent frigatebirds, large black-and-white sea birds with long scissor-like tails, wheel overhead. Brown pelicans glide low over water, wing tips bowed as they skim the surface, their keen eyes searching for fish.

The head of a gray whale emerges underneath a spout, then arcs slowly back into the water, the knuckles of its spine disappearing one by one. Even from a distance, those who see a 40-foot gray whale for the first time are awe-struck.

The next morning, everyone heads for Boca de Soledad, the northern bay entrance, where whales swim past churning surf.

There, several pairs of cows and calves move in tandem. Two of the expedition’s six boats speed toward one pair. But mother and child take a diagonal detour under Cole’s boat and away from their startled pursuers.

Word comes across the walkie-talkies of possible breeding behavior and voyeur dolphins. The boats zoom toward roiling waters.

Sure enough, at least three whales are tumbling, their pectoral fins poking the surface at odd angles. But the larger female appears disinterested and dives away. Because whales have no legs and only the smallest of pectoral fins, Cole said it usually takes a second male to help maneuver the bodies for mating. Similarly, a younger female often acts as midwife for a cow giving birth.

Here and there, a whale’s elongated head pokes straight up for a peek. “Spy hop at 11 o’clock!” shouts Frazer to Cole and a second photographer in his boat.

In the distance, a large whale breaches, throwing its heavy body in the air and twisting so that its barnacled left side and back smack the water.

“No one really knows why gray whales breach,” explains Cole as he tries to maneuver closer. “It could be a personality thing--something the more rambunctious whales do. Since they can see with ‘spy hops,’ they don’t need to spend all that energy just to see. Perhaps the force of the impact is intended to knock those irritating barnacles off their skin.”

Just beyond the bay mouth, a gray whale is moving south. Its slender calf glides alongside, taking three or four breaths for each of mom’s. Cole’s passengers gasp at the sight of a deep gash in the cow’s back. Red muscle is visible below the blubber, as are orange patches of sea lice. The wound’s “V” shape suggests the animal was cut by a large ship or boat propeller.

Frazer and others worry that the mother won’t have the strength to heal and to adequately nurse the calf, and still make the long swim north in April.

As the days wear on, no whale seems eager for a close encounter with humans. Mad dashes in all directions in three-foot choppy seas exhausts the boaters.

Dejected veterans compare it to San Ignacio, where whales congregate in large numbers and don’t bolt at the sight or sound of boats.

Beside a roaring campfire that night, a disappointed Cole draws his own comparison of Magdalena Bay and San Ignacio: “It’s like playing baseball too long and getting traded to a bad team. I’m going to stop doing this unless they (Mexican officials) make this easier.”

Cole resolves to explore waters farther south at dawn, well before other boat traffic in the bay.

Several miles down the channel, he discovers calmer waters, almost a bay-within-a-bay, where nearly a dozen whales are slowly cruising, rolling and spouting.

After a day of exploring, Cole and his crew head back to camp. He learns that the pilot of one of his other boats has taken off on his own.

It seems Azad Booker was fed up. He’d been tracking whales for four days, but hadn’t gotten near enough for even a touch. So he left his girlfriend, Jaffe, and two passengers eating lunch on a dune-covered beach with the boat that none of them knew how to run.

Booker donned wet suit, snorkel and fins and swam into the murky bay waters. Within moments, he was touching one whale and was encircled by several more. He let the current carry him.

“It was incredible and very scary,” he said later. “You could feel their power. It was immense.”

Booker was soon surrounded by other expedition members who chastised him for risking injury and abandoning his passengers.

The following morning, everyone heads for the new whaling grounds. Despite his engine troubles, Cole’s boat beats the others to the Whale Freeway, where innumerable spouting whales seem to cruise in circles.

They are so close and so untroubled by the boat’s presence, Cole whoops with joy and dances the “Friendly Shuffle” barefoot on the sandy metal floor of the Zodiac.

Nearby, a calf rides its mother’s broad back, tumbling off like a child on a slide. The calf swims closer, intrigued by Cole’s gurgling engine.

Behind him, the mottled white-and-gray whale breaches like a Baryshnikov of the sea performing for an admiring crowd. The first five leaps are followed by a series of eight. Rolls of film are exhausted in seconds.

Cole and his crew are breathless by the time the others catch up. They, too, are treated to spy hops, breaches and playful cows and calves.

Suddenly, a shout is heard over the battery-operated “easy talkers” linking the boats. It’s Mike Hawe, a British-born auto mechanic from Long Beach who goes whale-watching every weekend. It was his first trip with Cole, and so far, he’d been disappointed.

Now a whale had stopped within a foot of their boat.

“I could have reached out and touched it, but I restrained myself,” said Hawe, sitting cross-legged in the boat, a six-day stubble poking around the chin strap of his broad-brimmed straw hat.

A blissful cockeyed grin stretched from ear to ear, as though he’d been transported to heaven.

“His eye was looking at me and he was smiling,” Hawe said, shaking his own smiling face in amazement. “It was just an incredible feeling!”

Winter Odyssey of Gray Whales California gray whales migrate each winter along the Pacific Coast to mate and give birth in warmer waters off Mexico’s Baja California. Whales live off stored blubber until their return to summer feeding ground.

In protected lagoon waters, pregnant grays bear 2,000-pound calves, 12-foot-long. The calves consume up to 50 gallons daily of mother’s milk, which is 40% fat. In two months, calves will double in weight and be ready for the long journey north.

Gray whales weigh 40 to 45 tons and reach lengths of 50 feet.

Whales use baleen to filter food from the ocean floor. Baleen consists of thin plates that hang from the upper jaw. Source: U.S. National Marine Fisheries Agency; The Gray Whale; Whales; The World of the California Gray Whale.