Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
is accompanied by Steve Roy, who plays two different accordions, the harmonica, the
spoons, and the Jew's harp, sometimes all at once.
A sea chantey is a working song from whaling days, a tool for the sailor to help with
jobs on board the whaling ships. Don begins with a capstan shantey, to be sung to the rais-
ing of the anchor, a six to twelve hour job. “Away Rio,” it's called, and by the last verse
we roar out the chorus like we're hauling on the line ourselves. He sings ballads as well as
chanteys, “The Golden Vanity,” “Leaving Liverpool,” “Titanic,” and, in honor of Walt
Cunningham, one of the originators of
Whalefest!
who died recently in a diving accident,
“Fiddler's Green”:
I don't want the harp or the halo, not me
I'll see me old shipmates someday on Fiddler's Green.
By the last verse half the audience is in tears.
Saturday morning promptly at nine a.m. I present myself at the small boat harbor to
board Brad Chapman's
St. Phillip
, along with Jan Straley and a hundred other hopeful
whalewatchers. It's clear, the sun is bright, the mountains and islands stand out in clear re-
lief on all sides, and the sea goes on forever. It's hard to find a bad view in Alaska, but
Sitka does set the bar pretty high. Second-time
Whalefest!
attendee Mary Ida Jeffers of
Seattle confides, “The scenery is as good as the whales.”
We aren't ten minutes out of the harbor before we spot our first humpback, and then
they're everywhere we look. “Fifty to seventy-five whales have been feeding in Sitka
Sound since September,” Jan tells us. One dives off the starboard bow, raising its flukes to
display a distinctive white and black pattern on the undersides. “That looked like 1055,
which is a female,” Jan says. A whale fluke is like a human fingerprint, she says, no two
are alike.
Jan has studied whales from Admiralty Island to Glacier Bay, and in collaboration with
other biologists has produced a catalog of nearly 1000 different whales with pictures of
the identifying flukes. The resulting data base allows biologists to track whales from
Alaska to Hawaii and back again, an annual migration we didn't even know the hump-
backs made until 1979.
