The largest animal that ever existed

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 16^th 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.

The view as we approached the harbour