A whale called Louis Armstrong

Walking back to the Fuso Szulc from dinner with the Gonzales, a horrendous sound was heard.
All over the wide dry riverbed.
A sound never heard before.
Like a gigantic trumpet being played.
A boast of air into a musical instrument as big as a bus.
Filling the local cosmos.

It was dark.
The sound repeated and seemed to come from the sea.
No idea what it was.

But it was so loud.
And so strange.
Never heard anything like this before.
It repeated with various intervals and seemed to move along the beach.

With no light it made no sense to go out and check what the hell this was.
Besides being stopped by a certain fear.

In the morning the usual rising was long before the sun was starting to shine.
And once out of bed this strange loud and lugubrious sound was heard again.
Quickly the Fuso Szulc was left for the seashore and there it was discovered who was making this unusual sound.

A whale.

This time of year many whales come to cruise in front of the coast of Baja California, Mexico.
Like the California Gray Whale, the Blue Whale and the Fin Whale.
They come to escape the cold Alaskan waters, to mate, give birth and find food.



This is one of the spectacular aspects of living near the Sea of Cortez.
These months, often whales can be spotted from the beach.
The glistening wet backs and the 30 ft ( 9 m) high spray coming from the blowhole.
When they come to the surface to breath before to dive under again.

Sometimes they even more or less jump out of the water and that is like seeing a slow motion movie scene.
It is majestic and gives a huge splash.
No wonder: the mammals are up to 105 feet ( 32 meters) long and weigh up to 200 tons (181.437 kilos).



The puzzling and scaring sound came from one of the blue whales cruising in front of Punta Boca del Salado.
Somehow, his or her blowhole worked like a trumpet when blowing out the air after surfacing.
Maybe the mammal had bronchitis, was asthmatic or had an abscess at his blowhole narrowing it.

Clearly that morning, very close to the beach, the blue whale passed by, came to the surface, blew his air making this sound that reverberated all the space around.

In this way the trajectory of this particular blue whale could be followed.

One conclusion was that the mammal was feeding the area in front of the Fuso Szulc as of the night before.
And in the morning it was making huge circles.
Swimming along the coast from the south to the north, moving out onto the sea to the east, coming back to the beach and going north again.
Indicating the exact position by his trumpet sounds.

It was awesome.

At coffee time much later, Gumaro Gonzales was joined.
He immediately asked about the sound of the whale.
It was the hot topic of the Starbuck's moment.
Everybody of the Gonzales family talked about it.
Gumaro said:

“I live here all my life. That is 60 years and never have I heard this before”.

Hence, a unique phenomenon we share.






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