Home trip

Beach-combings.

After all our bags were packed, I took one last look around the kitchen. On our arrival it had been a spartan place with empty cupboards and no personal nick-nacks. By the end of the week we had cluttered up the fridge with salami and treats and we had personalised the window-sill with flotsam and jetsam from the storms of the week.

After a final group photo, we were driven by Iva to the local airport. The whole team of six Earthwatch volunteers caught the same flight out of Andenes to Tromsø, so we all got to experience one more adventure together.

Group Photo.

The airport terminal is tiny and the formalities are over in minutes. The field is shared with the military, so you cannot take photos, but the advantage is that there is an excellent, very long runway. The plane is swiftly loaded and you taxi out to the strip: so far, so good.

The plane was light as there was only ten or so passengers. We were on full power with our two propellers clawing hungrily at the moist air and I could feel the nose lifting after only a few hundred yards, then the nose bit down hard and the brakes screamed and bumped as we came to an emergency stop.

Safe arrival in Tromsø.

No one was at all alarmed as it was obvious that there was nothing wrong with the plane. We guessed that a hazard had appeared on the runway and I hoped is was my elusive reindeer, but it was birds. A large flock of gulls and waders had chosen that moment to fly across the peninsular. The swift action of the pilot had saved the life of at least one gull, and possibly all of us. My pals shook their fists at me as I was the bird-man on the trip.

"Your birds are a total nuisance, Jim."


I lost touch with the others as soon as we arrived in Tromsø. Richard and Eleanor stayed in transit for a flight to Heathrow, Ann was bound for Berlin while Warren and Laura were heading into town to explore before their night-flight. I was stuck alone in the arrivals lounge waiting to check in for a direct flight to Gatwick. Still, with free Wi-Fi, I had time to send you this.

My flight home to Gatwick was direct without a stop in Oslo. True to form we took off into the Great Norwegian Cloud and that was the last I saw of Norway for a whole hour. I took a short nap and then started on a new chapter of the book I had carried with me all week, unopened.

If you have ever pursued whales and wanted to get to grips with them from both an artistic and a scientific view (the living whale and what it means) the book for you is "Leviathan" by Philip Hoare. Beware though: the alternative title is "The Whale" and it has a different cover, but it is the same book.

The set book on "Sperm Whales" for this expedition is by Hal Whitehead. It is a brilliant introduction to the subject by a scientist who can write. "Leviathan" is by a writer who can do science. It is a really good read, like the award winning "Cod" by Mark Kurlansky, taking in every aspect of the whale without ever becoming a dull catalogue of facts. Did you know, for instance, that Starbuck's coffee chain is named after the first mate on the Pequod? Or that Moby (the pop musician, Richard Melville Hall) is a direct descendant of Herman Melville who wrote "Moby Dick"? Or that Captain Hook is based on Capt. Ahab, and the crocodile replaces the whale in "Peter Pan"?

In truth the shadow of Moby Dick hangs heavily over Philip Hoare, and over all of us who seek the whale. I am tempted to have a second try at reading the original now.

One of our team, who had never seen any whale before this trip, candidly remarked that her first sighting of a sperm whale wasn't what she expected. None of us knew what to say. On reading "Leviathan", I can see what she meant. Our vision of the whale is based on art and literature from a time when the only view of a whole whale to be had was from strandings or from the descriptions from the whaling men themselves. From our world, suspended in the interface between ocean and atmosphere, with maybe 2 km of water under our keel, all we can see of a sperm whale is the top of it's head and part of it's back. This animal is helpless on the surface because it needs to charge its blood with oxygen for maybe fifteen minutes before exhaling all the air from its body and descending to the invisible depths where we cannot follow, for over an hour. So, although we can claim to have seen a sperm whale, we have only seen a glimpse of part of it.

The dead whale that we saw had sunk into the beach so that we could only see the top of it's head and it's back, so it looked like it was swimming in sand. It could not tell us anything more than we had seen from the boats.

One day we will be able to attach a camera to the whale, that works at pressure 2 km under the sea in the darkness and transmits its images back to us. Then we will have a more rounded, 3D image of the sperm whale. For now we may be awed, but at the same time frustrated.

The paradox of the sperm whale is that it is unknowable, but we ache to know it's secrets. That's the attraction.

Norway is a bit like a whale: After losing sight of it for an hour I caught a brief, final glimpse of prosperous marinas and fertile valleys around Stavanger or maybe Kristiansand, before heading out across a cloudless North Sea to Essex, the Thames estuary, Kent and East Sussex.

To my whale-watch pals I have to say that I'm so sorry to have missed the chance for a proper good-bye, but I think we all got along really well and it was a real honour to have met you all.

Bon Voyage!

Jim