WHALES AND THEIR BITE (THE GREAT AUSTRALIAN BIGHT, THAT IS)...

I fly a lot...

and I tend to just gaze out the window whilst
I contemplate the deeper things in my life.

Recently I was flying over the Great Australian
Bight from Melbourne to Perth...

You know, the big curved bit at the centre
bottom of my country.

From way up there I was just gazing at the
very calm sea and marvelling at the fact that there
were no white caps at all, when I realised that the
water was actually being disturbed. Disturbed enough
to make frothy white patches on the surface that
would disappear as quickly as they came. As I
looked I realised there was a pattern to them,
and that they looked as if something physical
below the surface was causing the disturbance.

The plane was very high so I couldn't make out
much detail, but the bright sunlight certainly
made the whiteness of those patches stand out.
It was then that I realised that I was watching a
pod of whales lumbering along and breaking
surface every so often.

It really was amazing... and it made me
feel quite insignificant within the
greater scheme of things.

After concentrating on them a while, I could
see that there were groups within the larger
group, and I would estimate that there was
about thirty whales spread over maybe ten
square kilometres.

Even from that distance, they looked so majestic
as they lumbered along. I could tell by the size
of some of the 'white caps' as they breached
the surface, that some of the whales must've
been quite smaller than the rest. Family groups
with young?

I've never seen a whale up close. Being a teenage surfing
Aussie in my younger days, I saw my share of Dolphins
and the odd shark up close... the Dolphins were cute
and the sharks were a blur... but I'd love to have a close
encounter with a pod of whales.