Whale/Porpoise-Watching Senegalese Style

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Thanks to former grade 6 parent, current ISD PTA President, and intrepid ROV explorer Colin P., a group of ISDers set out in search of marine mammals yesterday morning, armed with motion sickness remedies of various types, medicinal, nutritional, and psychological.

We booked a couple of piroques through Momodou, an older Lebu fisherman extraordinaire, and charter piroque captain, out of Plage de Ouakam. The plan was to head out deep, some 15 km from shore, nearly out of sight of land, with dreams of being surrounded by hundreds whales and porpoises.

Whale watching has, in my experience, always had a endurance aspect to it, both with respect to the pitch and rolling of the vessel, and the likelihood of seasickness, and the needle-in-a-haystack luck required to find critters willing to be observed, before they sound and vanish.

I get nauseous just recalling two whale-watching field trips with second graders a few years ago, during which I got to know a parent on the fantail while we took turns puking over the back. The conversation went something like this: Yes, I agree. Pardon Me. Pllllllluuuuuurgggggggg.

While we had a dry trip, as it were, I think it's safe to say that we were all green at one point or another, and it would have been very entertaining to fake getting sick to see if the rest would have reflexively begun chucking their cookies. An experiment for another day.

We lasted about three hours. Wayne spoke for all of us when he said, I don't think my kids would be disappointed if we headed in sometime soon. Of course the rest of us were thinking, I find the regurgitation of my breakfast to be just a tad distracting.

We did meet up with a small group of porpoises, for a few minutes. They swam beneath the other boat, surfaced, took a few deep breaths, and adios, that was it. The piroque, being close to the water, made it difficult to track the porpoises, along with the five foot swell. Still, it was something, and we didn't capsize, despite the rather hair-raising beach landing in a moderate shore break.

Note two videos of the day uploaded to You Tube at video1 video2.