Small craft warning: whale breathing ahead

I STOP PADDLING FIVE

miles off the Palos Verdes shoreline, with half a mile of water beneath me. My momentum dies along with the burbling, slapping noise that goes with it.

Gulls and grebes shrill and chatter in the distance; cresting swells whisper; jets whine high overhead. My adrenaline stirs for an instant until I realize, false alarm, that the beard stubble rustling against my life jacket sounds very much like a blue whale’s heavy breathing.

Finally I hear what I came for: a long, low ahhhhh, off to the west. And another, and another. Now I can see the blows, fine geysers billowing against the blue mist that hangs over the Catalina Channel. One one-thousand. Two one-thousand. Three. Let’s see, I think, sound waves travel 1,100 feet per second, so they’re close. I crank up my paddling cadence to the churn of a racer.

The celery-green bow of my absurd little vessel, a well-worn Ocean Kayak Scupper Pro, splashes toward blue whales, the biggest animals that have ever lived. They weigh as much as a 747. A small child could crawl through one’s aorta.

Now, panting, I close in on the spot where I heard the first blows. The whales resurface in ones and twos, their mottled, battleship-gray backs slicing the water like submarines. Sometimes, curled dorsal fins appear, way back near the tails, looking not much bigger than a bottle-nosed dolphin’s. There are four or five here, some as long as 70 or 80 feet, and a teenager as short as 40.

They take three or four breaths, then arch and dive to feed. These leviathans could swallow my kayak whole. But my only fear, sitting in this ocean lawn chair, is of my own idiocy, of falling off its open deck this far from shore. Blue whales eat krill, tiny shrimp -- not people sheathed in plastic.

The whales resurface a quarter-mile away. If I chase them, they’ll reappear behind me, so I sit still. I steady my lens against the roll of the sea. Then, as I scramble to change film, a blue rises and blows, not a hundred feet away. The geyser mist rides the weak wind, and the drops shower my arms and face. Shrimp breath? No, just cool, clean salt water.

The whales drift toward Catalina. My left hip is cramping, my arms and shoulders are tightening, and salt is crusting around my eyes and swelling my lips. Fog threatens to cloak the Palos Verdes bluffs.

I turn for home. The run back is fast and smooth, with the swells I fought all the way out pushing me toward the Point Vicente Lighthouse and, beyond, the clutch of the humming city.