Call me Ishmael

Having grown up in the heartland, I'm not all that comfortable around large bodies of water. I mean, I can swim more or less, thanks to summer morning swimming lessons as a kid (one humid whiff of chlorine today and I'm immediately whisked away to the cold rough concrete on my wet bare feet with my clothes in a wire basket as I slap my way from the cement shower stall to stand shivering in the lineup at the edge of the frigid outdoor municipal pool). But aside from the occasional dunking while river rafting, my exposure to large bodies of water is fairly limited. So the vast immensity of ocean at my doorstep is especially intimidating with its hypothermic chill, crushing waves, and unfathomable depths.

It was not without some trepidation, then, that I stepped aboard the 56-ft Salty Lady on Sunday. Now, I've been on plenty of ferry boats of course, but crossing the Bay is to the open ocean what fetching caulking at the hardware store is to browsing at IKEA on a Saturday afternoon. Yet that's precisely what I was up against as my friend Beth and I were going on an all-day whale watching trip to the Farallon Islands, which sit at the edge of the continental shelf some 27 miles due west of the Golden Gate.

The Farallons are a National Wildlife Refuge in the midst of a Marine Sanctuary and off-limits to everyone but researchers. Eerily beautiful barren granite crags, they're the largest sea-bird rookery in the lower-48 and are home for thousands of seals and sea lions, including some endangered ones. The surrounding waters are filled with great white sharks and 18 species of whales and dolphins, and were the site of the famous footage of an orca attacking a great white a few years ago. Intriguing, right? I've been wanting to visit since I first spotted them on the horizon in the rare glare of fair sunset air.

I've never really suffered from motion sickness before, but I've also never spent time on the high seas, so I took no chances and dosed up on Dramamine, ate a "high protein low fat" breakfast as recommended, had my little pressure-point wrist bands, and packed snacks of ginger snaps, ginger granola, and candied ginger. Of course, the nice weather probably made the most difference, and the Pacific uncharacteristically lived up to its name as, for much of the trip, the waters were calm and glassy smooth.

We greeted the beautiful sunrise (along with 15,000 women running a marathon), boarded our boat, and disappeared into the fog as we motored beneath the Bridge and out into open water, hitting the large swells of the Potato Patch shoals and crossing the calm waters of the gulf beyond, accompanied by dolphins and gulls and the vast expanse of steel-grey sea and sky. The deck-hand caught a beautiful turquoise rock cod, the naturalist got giddy at the site of a tropical brown booby, I nearly fell off the boat as it braked for a mola mola, and I vowed never to release a helium balloon into the air again since we literally saw more of these littering the sea waiting to kill a sea turtle than we saw wildlife. The humpbacks we encountered were indifferent to our harassments and we were never thrilled by close encounters or breaches.

Still, alone amidst the blinding vastness it was easy to understand the lure of a life at sea (though romantic notions fade somewhat when imagining sailing for 3 years at a time, eating hardtack and saltpork, getting in a little dingy to row out and harpoon a leviathan, or butchering and rendering the blubber onboard. What a peculiar piece of history, that). Had there been swells or chop, I surely would have been wan and wretched, but as it was, I had a luminous adventure and plan to repeat it periodically... especially if the food supply rebounds and the blue whales return... If for no other reason than so I can shout, "There she blows! Off the starboard bow -- there she blows!"