MOBY DICK (SIC)

What better way to spend your anniversary than on a 4-hour 'Whale Watch.'
We thought...
For starters, it was certainly more 'watch' than 'whale'. There was an enormous amount of watching in fact, in totally arctic conditions. After about an hour of the crew members going 'look - over there!' and pointing at a vast expanse of, well, ocean actually, I was beginning to think it was a huge con and started muttering in a mutinying-sort-of-way to nearby passengers 'they're making it up.....'

Finally there was a whale. Thank God, I thought, now we can go back. Because I was so not dressed for this trip. Nobody was dressed for this trip. Frankly, you'd have to have been in Inuit clothing to be dressed for this trip. Ah yes, the whale. Well in the femto second that I glimpsed it, it was brown and big and gone again. And from this everyone deduced that it was a finback whale. And who am I to argue. After another half hour or so of waiting (read freezing) for it to appear again, which it didn't, the crew decided it was time to give up and return to Boston.
By this point I had lost the feeling in everything except my marriage, which was just about hanging on in there by a halyard. The TH was in good spirits though and suggested, helpfully, that perhaps the whales had all gone to Boston today on a 'Human Watch' trip.

Then conditions worsened. It had by no means been a smooth ride out, but now we appeared to be 25 miles into the Atlantic on something resembling a large dinghy with 4 ft waves, gale force winds and the roughest seas I have ever experienced even in my wildest nightmares. Even the crew looked pale, which is a facial shade you don't particularly want to see from your prospective lifesavers under such circumstances. And of course everybody, everybody except the TH and I that is, became instantly seasick. There are times when it pays to be a shark and come from an Island. We were just a tiny little bit smug, it has to be said.

So for the next hour and a half we were being flung from port to starboard and back (trying to avoid flying vomit), and to tell the truth it was quite exhilarating and enjoyable - in a survival sort of way. Not to mention the calories we must have burned just trying to stay alive.

The crew decided to give everyone complimentary tickets to come back and do the trip again, as the whales had been less than present this time around. Haha! It was as much as 50 green-faced people could do to actually walk off the boat, never mind raise their right arm to pick up tickets to go through it all over again. We took some tickets though, in a smiley bouncy happy way, just to rub it in....

It took the rest of the day and the hotel room heater on 90 degrees to get warm again. Then to a gorgeous restaurant (good call K!) for lovely anniversary meal. We are totally in love with Beacon Hill here, so that's where we'll be if we don't come back......