Whale Watching Tour Accidentally Follows Plastic Bag for 40 Minutes
A whale watching vessel operating out of the Helderberg coastal area spent approximately forty minutes of a two-hour tour this week in dedicated pursuit of what the skipper described as “a strong candidate” for a southern right whale and which turned out, upon the candidate surfacing at considerably closer range than a whale typically allows, to be a large white plastic bag moving through the water with a languor that, in the skipper’s defence, is not entirely unlike a whale at distance in moderate swell.
The passengers, fourteen in total and mostly tourists from Gauteng for whom this was a first ocean excursion, followed the developing situation with genuine excitement through the first thirty minutes and a slightly more qualified excitement through the second, during which the bag had not surfaced in the expected way but had continued to move in a direction that the skipper maintained was “consistent with feeding behaviour, possibly.” One passenger who had done significant preparatory reading before the trip noted, in a tone he tried to make diplomatic, that the object appeared unusually flat. The skipper said conditions were unusual.
At the forty-minute mark the bag surfaced fully on a small wave and was visible to everyone on the upper deck as an object of unambiguous non-cetacean origin. It was a Pick n Pay bag, large, with approximately a third of its length submerged and the rest moving freely. It was not a whale. It had not been a whale at any point in the preceding forty minutes. This fact settled over the vessel in the way such facts do, not dramatically, just thoroughly.
The skipper, who has thirty-one years of experience on these waters and who has found actual whales on this route more times than he can count, said only “right, let’s find the real ones then” and turned the vessel. He did not elaborate on the bag. The passengers, to their credit, did not press the point. Two genuine southern rights were located twenty minutes later and were everything the occasion required. The tour ended well.
The bag was not retrieved from the water, which the skipper acknowledges was “an oversight given the circumstances” and which he says he has thought about since.
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