Day 14 - Puffins and whales, oh my!

Today we had a puffin and whale tour on a catamaran. We were all very excited - but let me not get ahead of myself. We had to get everyone up early because we left the house at 7am to get to the 8:30am tour. Fortunately, we were all boarded without incident and we got a nice table inside on the 2nd deck where we could all sit.


Within minutes of leaving the dock, one of the younger members of our group began to feel sick. If you've never experienced sea sickness (of course, I haven't!), I hear that it's pretty awful and you wish you were dead. You can't get rid of the nauseas feeling until you get back to land. Did I mention this tour lasted 4 hours? I believe we were to go about 25 miles offshore.


Our first "stop" was off Petit Manan Island where there is a colony of puffins! This lighthouse is the second-tallest lighthouse on the coast of Maine and pre-dates the Civil War (that's 1861, to you knuckleheads).

We didn't get all that close and it was really hard to see any of these second-favorite birds but here are a few pictures of some that I was able to take.

Then, we continued to cross the entire Atlantic ocean in search of whales. At least I think thats probably the way it felt to those on our boat who "had issues".

See what we saw!

Oh, did I forget to include the whale pictures?

Nope, I didn't forget. We didn't see any whales. We did torture what I would guess to be about 80% of the people on the boat for about 4 hours by riding around in the rolling seas. Did I mention yesterday that we had a storm in the evening? Turns out, the affects of that storm were 2-4 foot waves and a rolling feeling on our boat. I guess that is a really bad feeling. As was said in the Stephen King story, The Body, it was a "complete and total barforama!"

Perhaps I'm stating this a bit too strongly. We did see about a half-dozen whale spouts - what I like to think of as whale snot. This is when they surface their blow-holes and exchange the air in their lungs for fresh air. It causes a spout of 10-15 ft in height. We saw these about a half mile away. My, wasn't THAT exciting. The naturalist who was narrating our ride said she also saw two dorsal fins. Ooooh. By the way, it was "determined" that these various spottings were from fin whales and minky whales.

We were very fortunate that the company has a "see whales or you get a free credit for another ride" policy. Can you imagine? You took a 4-hour ride on the barf-boat and see no whales but here's a ticket to repeat the experience! Yeah, I'm all over that.

Fortunately these vouchers, though non-transferable, never expire. So we can wait a few years for the horrific memory to dim and give it another go.

Enough on that subject.

After another picnic lunch on the hill overlooking Bar Harbor (named, as it turns out, after Bar Island in the harbor), we were rained upon for about 30 minutes. The knucklehead and his wife split from the rest and went to visit Mr John's mother who also now lives in Southwest Harbor.

It was on departing this place that knucklehead decided that he might be "coming down with something". We returned to the house and he proceeded to get himself a fever. He is getting some rest while I write my fan-blog. Hopefully this passes quickly - tomorrow we all hop in the car for our 13+ hour ride home. The first leg is a return to Wilkes-Barre, PA, which is probably 9 or 10 hours. Depending on when we get there, we might stop for the evening or continue the remaining 4-ish hours to home. Cross your fingers, my friends.

DucKie out!