June
1994
Fracture:
The Great-Winged New Englander
By Mia MacDonald and Martin Rowe
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Stellwagen Bank, twenty-six miles out of Boston Harbor,
is one of the foremost whale watching sites in North America. Humpbacks
visit Stellwagen
Bank each spring and summer before returning to the warmer seas off
Puerto Rico in the autumn to breed. This is what happened one blustery
day at the end of May last year.
We had been at sea for two hours - silently watching the slate and
coal-black waves passing us by - when the captain told us a whale had
been sighted.
We made our way up the stairs to the ship’s rail, craning to
see something more than a bit of ocean moving skywards in the distance.
Then we saw him: Fracture, a seven-year-old humpback, thirty-five to
forty feet long, named by researchers using the unique striations on
humpback whales’ tal flukes as identifying markers. For the next
two hours we watched Fracture breach over and over again in front of
us. To see and hear the whale breaching - without the aid of a video
screen or a soothing voiceover - made the experience of the whale somehow
more real. The noise was awkward, the splash asymmetrical, like the
snapping of a wet sheet before it’s hung out to dry. We felt
we wanted to chase him, get closer, be somehow with him. He became
an object
of fascination - our initial joy at seeing a large mammal unconstrained
by bars or wire receding as we wanted more. How like a whaler, we thought,
or a typical consumer; wanting to keep the whale there, where we could
be.
Fracture, however, seemed largely unaffected. We tried to follow his
tracks by staring at the green phosphorescent wake the underside of
his magnificently graceful white lateral fins made in the refracted
water. For just an instant we would catch his sleek black spine curving
in and out of the barely disturbed sea. And then suddenly, with a seemingly
effortless arc, he would rise from the water and twist his ridged belly
in our directon before curving triumphantly down into the Atlantic.
The Latin name for Humpback, megaptera novaeangliae (or ‘great-winged
New Englander’) was never more apt: for this was his world and
he flew in it.
We watched Fracture waft his tail flukes and lateral fins in the air,
clapping them sonorously on the water, most probably to send messages
throughout the feeding ground. Our aimiable captain assured us these
weren’t signs of distress. Capable of swimming underwater without
surfacing for at least an hour (such is the 80% efficiency of a whale’s
conversion of oxygen), and covering a distance of perhaps seven miles
in the time, he would have been more than able to escape had he wished.
But Fracture didn’t; he stayed. He stayed even when for about
forty-five minutes, he was being watched by at least four largish commercial
whale watching boats (each with 50 to 100 people on board) as well as
two yachts sometimes cutting in and sometimes standing off. Voyager
II’s passengers were luckier than most: one of Fracture’s
breaches took place just off its bow, spraying the watchers with 50-degree
sea water, replicating the photos in the brochures we had collected
on shore.
Apparently, the flotilla of boats there that day was not large; during
summer months there can be over 70 individual vessels following a whale.
U.S. Federal regulations forbid a boat to sail head on at a whale or
move in closer than 35 yards. Currently, there are negotiations between
whale watching businesses and the National Marine Fisheries Service
to expand the distance to 100 yards, over concern that vessels are
interfering
with whales’ breeding and feeding patterns. To us, it seemed the
35-yard regulation was being loosely observed, the only restraint being
the captains’ good will; federal agents are rarely present to
enforce the regulations.
These days whale watching is big business, one made up of thousands
of small businesses. It began in earnest around Cape Cod in 1975, when
fishing companies sought to supplement their income by sending out their
boats to watch whales. Now whale watching is regularly the greater money-earner,
and off Cape May in New Jersey has become so successful that it supports
two companies year-round. From New Brunswick down nearly the whole eastern
seaboard, and from Alaska to San Diego, whale watching in the U.S. has
taken off.
This is a global phenomenon. Even the decision by Norway and Japan
to restart commercial whaling, so some believe, will ultimately be
countermanded
by demand to see whales (as long as there are some left to see). Off
the coasts of Japan, entire local economies now depend on whale watching.
Recently, Japanese advertisers, wanting to expand the market for whale
meat have drawn upon the 1000-year old tradition of whale hunting and
highlighted the supposed benefits of eating whale flesh. While we cannot
be complacent, it has been suggested these sentiments reflect the values
of older Japanese out of step with the younger generations’ wish
to watch rather than eat the whales.
Around Cape Cod, whale watching trips are made from Boston Harbor;
Provincetown on the tip of and Hyannis further down the Cape; Gloucester,
north of
Boston; and Plymouth to the south. Each boat, and there are several
from each port, charges around $18 to $20 for adults, usually half
price
for children, and offers concessions, games or videos to keep everybody
amused. This might well be necessary since, apart from Provincetown,
only an hour’s journey from Stellwagen Bank, the trips last about
seven hours. Most leave on the weekend in the early morning, returning
mid-afternoon; in peak summer and autumn months, whale watching boats
also operate on some weekdays and evenings. Information can be got
from
the Massachusetts Tourist Authority and the large tourist center in
downtown Boston.
Some of the whale watching boats are run by research organizations
working to preserve whales. A portion of the earnings from these trips
goes
to further research on marine mammals and advocacy for their protection.
A naturalist is on each of these voyages. Other companies, like the
one we journeyed with, do not have naturalists on board, although most
captains - including ours - are knowledgeable about whale behavior,
biology, and migration patterns. On each voyage, there is almost a
100%
chance of sighting a large marine mammal - perhaps an extremely endangered
right whale (right because whalers knew them as the ‘right’ ones
to kill) or rarely seen sperm whale, or more probably humpbacks or
dolphins.
All feed on Stellwagen Bank’s nutrient-rich marine environment
during the summer months. The area has been declared a national marine
sanctuary, so overfishing and development will be prohibited. Along
with supporting three species of whales, the Bank is also home to three
species of endangered sea turtles. One factor that could threaten the
Bank is the huge outflow pipe, currently under construction, which will
deposit one half to 1.2 billion tons of treated sewage each day from
the city of Boston and surrounding towns nine miles into Massachussetts
Bay. The pipe’s mouth will be only eight to nine miles from the
western edge of Stellwagen Bank. Although the project has been approved
by the Environmental Protection Agency, its ultimate effects on the
region’s ecosystem are unclear. The issue remains controversial,
as does the precedent of placing a sewage disposal site so near a marine
sanctuary.
When we think about what we saw and were doing that day, pleasure is
mixed with unease. Did a frightened Fracture slap his fins to alert
his fellow humpbacks, or was he simply an incorrigible show off? Was
one mammal watching 250 with as much joy as 250 were watching one? If
Melville was right, and a whale remembers, what was Fracture remembering:
Our injustices? Our fascination? Our more recent concern?
Undoubtedly, watching whales is better than killing them: but Fracture,
like all other animals, was not and is not there for us. Indeed, the
features of the ‘show’ - from Disney’s Little Mermaid
on the on-board video to Brigham’s ice cream, Folger’s
coffee, Bud Light on draft and Gallo wines at the two snack bars -
made Fracture
merely an extension of that need to be entertained in life rather than
embracing so huge an embodiment of it.
This was not lost on some of the youngest on board. A little girl,
waiting for Fracture to reappear, asked her brother off-handedly whether
she
could listen to his walkman. He, the tinny music almost drowning her
out, responded decisively: "Shut up and watch the whale." If
only it was as simple as that.
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