whale-watching

Whale-watching off Whitby is a risky business because you depend on the weather and sea state, the £25 charge doesn’t guarantee sightings and you never know if your stomach will behave itself. We were lucky as the weather was kind – just patchy thin mist – and the sea was almost flat calm at times. The Specksioneer (operated by Whitby Whale Watching) left St Ann’s Staith at 2.15 and returned nearly four hours later. By then we’d had about 20 sightings of juvenile minke whales, plus a few porpoise in the distance and a juvenile sunfish which looked like a carrier bag floating just below the surface. It’s a weird creature which swims on its side, occasionally flipping its fin above the surface. And to top it all, we retained the lemon hummus we’d scoffed at Becketts café, where owner Marion Haste realised wee Mackay would surely perish of hypothermia if she didn’t lend her a few layers, which explains the Nirvana hoodie. It would have been even better if we’d seen a humpback whale like the one spotted by Stuart Baines two days later. Apparently two humpbacks breached simultaneously on Sunday evening; what a shot that would have made. The boat owner was joined by a Swiss marine biologist who was monitoring cetaceans for the Sea Watch Foundation as part of her work on a Hull Uni course in Scarborough.