How eerie

It is 4am (we are now at UTC time) Friday morning June 20th.

There has been absolutely no wind for the past few hours. I mean none. The sea has barely any ripples whatsoever.

If I were to make a film about a scary sea monster attacking an innocent sailboat. This would be the climatic scene. The crew is asleep, except for the poor soul doing his early morning shift. Yup, this is what it would be like. Now, all I need is for some dolphin or even worse a whale to come out and scare the living crap out of the pour soul, me.

Scary music …

It is now 6am. No scary monster has disturbed my shift which has now ended. Dad is still sleeping so I let him sleep longer. There is still no wind but that eerie feeling is still in the air even after a beautiful sunrise.

At 7:00 am, I decide to wake up Dad, he takes over the watch with a very sleepy face, a few grumbles, and a few smiles. I go back for a quick snooze.

At around 8:30am, Dad yells “WHALES!, WHALES!” Get my DSLR go above deck and spend about an hour shooting photos of whales while Dad masterfully keeps a safe distance. We are followng the same protocol used for whale watching in the Azores: We approach very slowly from a rear quarter and stay parallel to them, we also depart slowly. Never closer than 50 meters (except for one of them that comes after us and within 5 meters as it dives below our sailboat) We also don’t attempt to get so close that we could feed or touch one.

It is 9:30am and we are going to have breakfast now. I’ll take a look at all the photos and pick a few to post later in the day.

Thus far, this has been a thrilling day!!!