Australia is teeming with kangaroos and, as an Australian, I know many places to find them on any given day.
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Except, when I took my American friend, who visited the Goulburn Valley for one weekend only, to see one in the wild, I couldn’t find a single macropod.
Sadly, he had to go home with his belief that we easily round up and ride these marsupials to school, shattered.
Finding a specific marine animal in the vast amount of ocean is surely an even tougher feat.
There is so much water.
And it’s deep and concealing water.
So even if there were a hundred creatures right below you, you might not see any of them from a boat.
Years ago, my middle child was obsessed with sharks.
I wanted to take him to Port Lincoln (in South Australia) to go shark cage diving with the great whites off shore, but he wasn’t old enough to be signed up for the experience.
I thought it might have been a blessing in disguise for us Victorians and my purse, for if we’d have taken the time and spent the dollars to get over there and found ourselves on a fruitless shark-locating expedition, the disappointment would have been tangible.
We looked at the next best option of free diving at Melbourne Aquarium with the well-fed, less predatory kind of ocean predators as an alternative, but the oceanarium was closed for renovation for a year or so.
The shark diving experience didn’t return immediately, as the sharks needed time to familiarise with their altered environment before introducing foreign food, I mean humans, to it.
By the time bookings opened again, my son’s aspirations to get up close and personal with creatures who go through 20,000 odd teeth in a lifetime had dissolved.
Our focus moved back to the ocean.
Booking a whale watching trip is risky if you’re the kind of person who gets your hopes up that you will definitely see whales on a cruise intended to.
We once went on a whale watching cruise on the Gold Coast where two of my three kids didn’t see any whales at all.
The fact they had their heads in barf bags had everything to do with it, but still, the ocean was angry that day, which meant we couldn’t go out too far, visibility was poor and there were more people spewing on the boat than people who weren’t, so the cruise was cut short.
I felt somewhat swindled.
Last week, on holidays in Jervis Bay, I dared to try our luck again.
A chalkboard at the entrance to our caravan park read: ‘5-10 sightings a day on whale watching cruises’.
Promising.
So, I booked and chucked a 300mm lens on my camera in anticipation.
The sun was out, but as we headed out of the bay, it was apparent our knack for choosing choppy days was still intact.
The captain offered tips to motion-sick passengers to alleviate their symptoms.
“Stay low on the boat, move to the back, get some fresh air, sip water, concentrate on your breathing and take a spew bag from our staff, implying ‘for the love of God don’t vomit on the carpet of our three-journey-old cruise vessel’.”
There were still spewers, but thankfully no-one from our party this time.
Out we went, while a pod of enthusiastic dolphins surfed the bow and leapt out of the water.
Seabirds flew above, but other than that, there was just a vast expanse of water before our eyes.
Then bam, a humpback whale breached in the distance.
We moved closer and then stopped and idled, so as not to frighten it.
It moved towards us; it was a calf.
Mum followed.
They frolicked a little before eventually Mum breached again, but then decided it was time to distance her and her youngster from us again.
We kept searching and found another further away from us.
Her back rose above the waterline a few times, but she didn’t ‘perform’ for us.
The waves got choppier.
The captain announced he’d take us back into calmer waters in the shelter of the bay where whales had been sighted on their morning cruise, as more people retreated to the back of the boat to barf some burley over the back bars.
In we went, as the bay’s resident dolphins found our wake to dance in once more.
But, no more whales and, just like that, we were heading back to the jetty.
The next day, the same cruise at the same time of day, witnessed a stunning double breach.
It’s the luck of the draw out there on the ‘high seas’, me hearties.
Whale I see a sea leviathan levitate, or whale I not, that is the question.
But, if you too want to give yourself the best chance, board a boat on the east coast between May and November, when tens of thousands of humpback and southern right whales are moving through their annual migration south with the calves they gave birth to in warmer northern waters swimming by their sides.
Nature is top-notch.