810-Lancaster Farming, Saturday, May 17,1986
■OCEAN CITY, Md. - Scanning
the bare Atlantic horizon from the
bridge of Mariner, his 65-foot
sport-fishing boat, Darrell Not
tingham sighs, “I’ve seen ’em so
thick you couldn’t count ’em.”
He and the other 52 people
aboard are looking for whales,
peering across the choppy ocean
with binoculars and bare eyes for
the trademark spout of a fin whale,
second-largest variety of the
world’s largest creatures and an
important citizen of global waters.
To no avail. After more than 10
windy, chilly hours at sea, Not
tingham and his disappointed
passengers return to Ocean City’s
Talbot Street pier. Whatever
whales dwell in those waters have
kept their whereabouts a secret.
Bad Day
Earlier in the day, as the
Mariner tosses and pitches 40
miles east of Ocean City, one of the
two naturalists aboard, Hal
Wierenga, can only shake his head.
“Today the chances are way
down,” he says. “This is not an
optimum trip.” Wierenga
estimates that he’s been out 88
times, and most of those times he’s
seen whales.
As the boat nears home, the sea
calms, color returns to the faces of
the few seasick passengers, and
the other naturalist, Wayne
Klockner, waxes philosophical.
“Probably within 100 miles of us,
north and south, there are hun
dreds of whales,” he says. “But for
some reason, the route they’re
traveling doesn’t coincide with
ours.”
Despite the probable discomfort
and the possibility of seeing no
whales, nature enthusiasts in the
mid-Atlantic region have been
signing up for the whale-watching
trips for the past 15 years.
They usually have to work to find
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Not All Whale Watching
them. Although whales are a
common sight off the U.S. Pacific
coast and farther north in the
Atlantic, they’re less common in
the mid-Atlantic, because they like
deep water, and the continental
shelf doesn’t drop off until it’s
nearly 60 miles out from the
Maryland shore.
“Human beings have a
tremendous affinity for these
mammals of the sea,” says Ron
Naveen of Cooksville, Md.,
organizer of the trips. “There’s
something about our culture that
has bred a lot of excitement about
whales.”
When one of the monsters <s
sighted the fin whales are as
long as the Mariner and sometimes
surface quite close to it the
passengers shout excitedly and
jump up and down, says Naveen,
an ebullient, 40-year-old bachelor
who gave up a successful career as
a lawyer five years ago to pursue
his interest in nature. “It’s a
visceral, emotional type of
reaction.”
Rewarded With Sightings
Most of the trips are more
productive than this one. Naveen
recalls voyages on which the
whale-watchers were rewarded
with sightings not only of fin
whales, but of sperm, Minke, and
killer whales.
Captain Nottingham produces
photographs of a fin whale that
“got right under the bow. I turned
off the engines because I was
afraid I’d run right up on his
back.”
Mariner is the only boat at the
dock that’s regularly chartered for
whale-watching and bird-watching
trips. Nottingham, a taciturn but
good-natured man who has spent
36 of his 49 years on the water, puts
up with substantial ribbing from
his fellow sport-fishing skippers.
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nature-lovers. Sitting before
Mariner’s electronic controls on
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Expeditions End In Success
A sailboarding visitor looking for whales is rewarded with a close encounter with two
humpbacks in Newfoundland's Bonavista Bay. Fortunately, the curiosity of the whales
was satisfied in one pass and they swam off unimpressed. All whales are protected by
Canadian law. Newfoundland’s Atlantic coast is known as "iceberg alley”, the Labrador
Current sweeping icebergs southward from Greenland and the Canadian arctic.
A decade ago, Naveen says, “It
was considered a bit wimpish, to
say the least, to have these people
take us offshore.”
Nottingham, who Naveen says
has “the best eyes in tjie world,”
might dispute that assessment
today. He’s developed his own
expertise in sea birds as well as
whales.
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the swaying bridge, he says,
“These people are a lot more
hardy than fishermen. If these
were fishermen, half of ’em would
be sick by now.”
Nottingham and Lynn Jarmon,
his youthful mate on Mariner, have
been on the boat since 6 a.m. Often
their trips with the naturalists last
12 or 15 hours. Rough waters
shorten this one by keeping them
from going beyond the continental
shelf.
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“Fishing’s getting terrible,”
Nottingham says. “I enjoy this.
But it’s such a long day, you
couldn’t do it all the time.”
,“It’s kind of like being a
detective out there, trying to solve
a mystery,” Naveen says of the
whales, intelligent creatures who
seem reluctant to share their
secrets with humans. “We really
don’t have the faintest idea where
these whales come from or where
they’re going.”
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