A whale of a Tale

Wow!  What a day.  What a little sunshine brings to the water.  The herring and salmon fry are hatched out and the top of water was just covered with fish feeding on the phyto plankton.  It truly does look like the water is boiling as you may hear it described.

The eagles were out in full force swooping down to catch a fish or as Larry says sometimes just to wash their claws.(they do miss!)

The best part was early evening.  We were watching a whale work the fish against the shoreline of the island across from us.  We didn't take pictures, sorry.
We were just watching it  through our binoculars as it splashed and rolled and spouted.  We could hear it.

Just then a large fishing vessel comes by our house pulling three other boats so the diesel engines were really booming.

 That got the whale moving too.  At first it stayed ahead of the boats but then it did a an avoidance maneuver and ended by coming up right beside the house and our cove is not that big or deep!  Good ol' Brick was barking, I was shouting, the whale was blowing, it was pretty intense for a while there.  Then we saw tail and he or she was gone.  The next spout we saw was in the distance.

As if that wasn't close enough of an encounter, we did it again this morning.
Lar and I were up at 5 a.m. to get the load of oysters to town for shipment.  JR got up even earlier to finish packing them.  So we load up the skiff and head to the dock.

It was low, low tide and Lar had just commented on the strength of the current when we saw another whale surface just inches off our port side bow!!  He was coming up with a mouthful just as we were going across his fishing hole.  It was over in an instant but etched in my visual memory.  I am sure that I will see that shiny gray back coming up and up and up in my dreams.