Lunenburg Whale Watching

JB is done teaching his 3-day class to bridge inspectors in Nova Scotia and now is home with us.  We had debated about going whale-watching, an expensive endeavor but something we knew the children would really like.  Now, none of us except for JB has seen whales before.  He's seen a bunch by default working in Alaska and especially up close.  My new friend, Dutch, who works down at the Marina within walking distance of our house, has given me the scoop on the best place and the best tour.  After calling him, he is willing to give us a discount since we are such a large family.  Jackson and the baby of course can go free and he'll give us a discount on top of that.

So we drive to Lunenburg on Friday morning and get there and find the lady behind the ticket counter with an even bigger heart.  She not only gives us the freebies but takes off $10 each on the other children and discounts Scott to the same rate even though he should be the adult rate.  She then takes some money off our tickets and comes up with one flat rate along with no tax which is a 15% savings in itself.  I am amazed and grateful for her kindness.

Leaving Lunenburg

Now, before you look at these pictures, you must know that if you have never been on a whale tour, you're in for a surprise.  Since I had never been I wasn't sure what to expect and I deicded not to have any preconceived ideas.  It was a good thing because I was wondering how we were going to *see* whales when in reality unless they are out of the water on the beach you cannot *see* an entire whale.  The whales we saw were all Fin whales, the second largest in the world.  Last week on the tour, a blue whale was spotted and I was secretly hoping for that but we didn't see one.  Again, I'm not sure how exactly you tell the difference when you are seeing very little of the whale and a lot of it's spouting.  We saw some fins though and some of the backs of them as they came up for air but other than the blowing up of air and water, that was that.  I think the children weren't really sure if they had seen this what they were supposed to see or not but when we saw the one with the fin on its back come up and we could see the whole back, they became excited about it.  In all honesty, I think one has to go on these whale tours an awful lot to get a feel for what you are looking for and what you are seeing.  It would happen so fast I wondered what I *did* see.  If you went often you would get a schema for it and began to understand how it works and their size in relation to us.  Apparently our boat at 50 feet was smaller than some of these whales but we were not real close to them.  Even knowing that whales are gentle giants is still not comforting when I know they are longer than our boat.  One of the most fun parts was the actual boat ride, about 10 - 15 miles out in the ocean.  While I don't get seasick and no one in our family did either (!), being on open water like that makes me uneasy; open water is scary to me although I don't know why. 

So here's a few pictures we managed to take although we were trying to look at the same time.  I didn't get one of the fin and the back and another time we saw a fin as well.

Someone throughly enjoyed the boat ride

Scenes from around Lunenburg - The Bluenose (a famous ship)

Colorful houses and houses turned into restaurants and stores are the norm along coastal Canada.

Quote of the Day:  "How big is it?  I just can't tell!"  - Mommy says when seeing the first whale.