After everything I have read and watched about the Blue Whale
population in Sri Lanka, I have been itching to check it out for myself for
some time now. It was the BBC feature on Blue whales and the research done by
Sri Lankan Marine Biologist Asha De Vos that got me psyched initially.
My Whale Watching excursion from Mirissa, a town on the South Coast of
the country, was long overdue and I was determined to go before the season was
over. The whale watching season for Mirissa starts in November and goes on
until April. Finally, on the 16th of March my trusty travel
companion and photographer [my dad!] and I drove down to the Mirissa Fisheries
Harbour hoping that it wouldn’t rain like it did the night before. We had to be
in Mirrissa at 6.20AM and we had to leave Colombo at 4 in the morning. I didn’t
have a hard time waking up though, because I woke up 3 times that night in
shock, thinking that I had overslept. Despite my patchy night’s sleep, I was
wide awake, alert and excited for the whole journey.
The Mirissa Fisheries Harbour
As we approached the Mirissa Fisheries Harbour, we followed the signage
that led us to The Mirissa Water Sports Center office because they were our
whale watching tour provider. A lady named Deepika handed us our packed
breakfast once we had signed in.Once we
got onto their boat, Jayasooriya2, we
were handed a bottle of water and a life jacket. We were amongst the first few
on board the vessel so we got the best spot right at the front of the upper
deck [provided of course, that you don’t mind getting splashed repeatedly by
the spray from when the waves hit the sides of the boat]. The boat left the
pier at around 7AM, just as the sun was rising.
Jayasooriya - 2
Our front row seating!
The Sunrise
For the first one and a half hours we didn’t see anything except for a
few flying fish, some fishing boats and a cargo ship and I was starting to
lose hope. I had read an article written by Naturalist Gehan De Silva
Wijerathne on whale watching in Mirissa that said that you are more likely to
come across a Blue Whale in Mirissa than you are to see a Leopard at the Yala
National Park. Needless to say, I was becoming a little sceptical of that
statement because I had seen leopards in Yala in the last few times I was on
safari there and it had been almost 2 hours and there were no signs of any blue
whales. The crew said that it was unusual that we hadn’t seen any yet but they
hadn’t lost hope.
A fishing boat
An overcrowded fishing boat!
A Cargo Ship
Just as I was about to lose heart, we encountered small school of
striped dolphins. This species of dolphin is easy to identify because of its
markings - you could recognise them easily by the stripe that runs along either
side of their bodies. They started showing off as they got closer to the boat
by jumping high above the water and performing some very entertaining
acrobatics, which were so amusing that I only caught bits of it on my camcorder
and my dad barely managed to get some pictures on camera because we were so
excited!
Notice the stripe that runs along the side?
The acrobatics
The splashes
The dolphin sighting renewed our hope and all eyes were searching the
waters for what we had come to see. Before I knew it, one of the crew yelled
“there, blue whale, at 10 o’clock” and I looked that way just in time to see the
largest animal in the world dive smoothly into deeper water. I got so excited
when I saw it that I momentarily forgot to point my camcorder in that
direction.So once again, I managed to
get only about 5 seconds of shaky unclear footage!
The crew keeping their eyes peeled
Everyone else keeping a look out as well
Around thirty meters long, the largest animal to have ever existed, far
bigger than the biggest dinosaur that roamed the planet is one of the most
humbling things I have ever seen. Despite their size, these endangered marine
mammals are so graceful and smooth in the water. People often assume that there
is an off-season for whale watching from Mirissa because the whales migrate.
That is not the case however, because the blue whale colony found off the coast
of Mirissa uncharacteristically do not migrate like the rest of their species
and instead they stay close to the deep canyon areas. The rough seas are the
reason for the off season.
The spray from their blow hole
Their back sliding back into the water
We saw 3 blue whales after that, and I managed to get better recordings
of the spray of water from their blow hole and their backs sliding gracefully
in the water. Unfortunately, we didn’t get to see their tails, also known as flukes,
sticking neatly out of the water as they dived down. I was glad that we started
to head back at around 11.45 because I was tired and sleepy after the early
start that morning. About an hour later my whale watching tour ended with the
sight of the red Mirissa Hills.
