A tale about Whales…

Ann Woolfe – Non-Exec Director at Soteria Planning In 2018 I was lucky enough to travel to Magdalena...

Ann Woolfe – Non-Exec Director at Soteria Planning

In 2018 I was lucky enough to travel to Magdalena Bay, Baja California in Mexico.  We went there specifically in the hope of getting a glimpse of grey whales in one of the quiet lagoons they swim to very year to have their calves.  They travel 10,000 miles from Alaska to get to this lagoon.

You would imagine that such a place would be over-run with tourists, with great big hotels and people trying to cash in on this amazing occurrence, even if only for a couple of months a year – but it was NOTHING like that.   People still rode horses around the town on dirt roads, like the Wild West, and the tiny shops sold ham by the slice and single eggs.  It was like stepping back in time.

We had learned that grey whales had all but been wiped out when whaling was legal, and that grey whales were known as Devil fish because they attacked the whaling boats.  They attacked the whaling boats because the whalers caught and killed their beloved calves.   The story goes that one day after the whaling had stopped, a grey whale swum up to a fisherman. He was terrified but stayed with her.  He understood that she wanted to be friends and from then on, the whales were protected in the lagoon and returned every year.

We were taken out on a small boat, just me, my husband and the skipper, on a misty morning at 8am.  The lagoon was as still as a mill pond.    As we chugged out to the centre of the lagoon, we started to spot whales…loads of them.  Beautiful massive tails suddenly appearing beside us, emerging out of the water as if in slow motion.  Other rolled on their sides and their huge side fins swept through the air, it was like a graceful ballet performed by giants.

As we got to the middle of the lagoon we saw another small boat, they were being visited by a mother and her calf.  They swim RIGHT UP to the boats and nuzzle against the side so you can stroke them – they love the human contact.  It’s like stroking a humungous dog.   The whale came over to our boat and bought her month-old calf with her, he was about 6 feet long.  She was around 30 feet long and the width of a Range Rover.   The sheer size is just breath-taking.   She puffed out of her blowhole and soaked us.  It was WONDERFUL.     She stayed with us for about 20 minutes and then she and her calf did something staggering called sky hopping, where they rise vertically out of the water – as if it was their finale.  There was no food involved, they were just doing their whale thing.

It was the best day of my life and I think about it often…

And then the other day I was on an ESG/Climate Change webinar and I learned that whales absorb enormous amounts of CO2, and if we could get the numbers of whales back to pre-whaling days, they would absorb 1.7 giga tonnes of CO2 A YEAR, which is more CO2 than is produced by all the worlds ICT, including all user devices, data centres, networks and TV (How Bad are Bananas – Mike Berners-Lee 2020).

So when you are buying stuff from Amazon – please consider setting up a SMILE account and donating to a whale preservation charity.  You could be saving the world.

As a business, Soteria Planning is committed to be environmentally friendly and as paperless as possible so this is important to us.