CTY July 26-August 2 post 2

Greetings! It would be a fool's errand to attempt to recount the full extent of the past three days' adventures in the half an hour I have to update the blog, but here are some highlights, in the order that they occur to me:

We have just finished... well, you all at home will find out what activity we just finished in a few days, when you receive a very unique postcard. A hint: our writing instruments were primitive to say the least.

We took the day to sail out to Stellwagon Bank, the same locale of our hired whale-watching charter. When we had sailed out as far as we were intended, we had only seen one humpback spout. It was thrilling, to be sure; it was like seeing an elephant in the distance, from the top of your range rover on the Serengeti, rather than in a zoo. But it was only one. When we had sailed maybe a quarter of the way back the way we came, a shout rang out from the lookout on the bow: "There she blows!" (really, one of the crew pointed out, how many chances are you going to get in your life to shout "there she blows!" from the deck of a schooner). We made our way over. The rest could have been a fairy tale. We saw at least fifteen humpbacks, probably closer to twenty. One breached (threw its entire body out of the water, and fell back in with a terrific splash) twice in a row, maybe a hundred yards away. Another two swam around not more than fifteen yards from the boat, with their mouths half open, after blow bubbles to send schools of tiny fish in confusion closer to the surface. Lunch was delayed at least half an hour.

Yesterday we visited the historic Pilgrim monument in Provincetown (the original landing place of the pilgrims). We then headed to the Center for Coastal Studies for a guest lecture on whale entanglement, and what the center is doing to help the whales that do become entangled in fishing and lobstering gear. It was a bit depressing, but also uplifting: from the crude innovation of using the "gobbler guillotine" crossbow arrow to sever fishing lines entangling Northern Right Whales, to the lecturer's suggestion that our students may be among the generation of scientists and engineers to develop rope-less lobster trap systems.

The students at the top of the monument

Valuable educational tool: A life-sized inflatable Northern Right Whale. It took nearly the entire class to lie the length of it.

Time for the all-hands muster, and the reading of last night's collaborative story project from from the watch (the students come up for 70 minutes at a time to make sure the ship is sound and secure). Stay dry!