A whale of an argument remains unresolved

Have you ever been involved in an argument that ended unsatisfactorily and then lingered in your mind, maybe for years, unresolved? This post is an attempt to resolve one of those. It came up as a memory after seeing this item about sei whales on Facebook the other day.

Sei whale photo by Christin Khan on the Mission Blue FB page.

The Sei Whale is the THIRD LARGEST baleen whale and one of the FASTEST of all cetaceans: it can sprint up to 50 kilometers per hour! They're also ENDANGERED, having been hunted to near extinction during humanity's whaling days. (Japan still hunts them, by the way.) – From the Mission Blue Facebook page.

It began off the coast of California a couple of days out from San Francisco Bay. On a dark gray afternoon we spotted a whale resting on the surface several hundred feet from the boat. The visual silhouette indicated one of the larger baleen whales, the long back with an unnaturally small dorsal fin in the rear third of the body. From experience, looking at it, I guessed a fin whale or a sei whale while others on the boat said it was a blue whale, one outside my experience.

In time and very authoritatively two people decided it was a blue whale and that was that. At the time to a younger person I suggested it could be a fin whale or a sei whale. One of these two authorities overheard me and said it could not be sei whale and I was dead wrong.  Now I hadn’t said it was definitely a sei whale, the way this former friend had decided it was a blue whale.  I just said it could have been and just as easily could have been a blue or a fin whale. No, it cannot be a sei whale, he said.  Why not, I asked. To that he said this wasn't sei whale habitat.

Sei whale range from the American Cetacean Society

Now, I knew better than that. Years earlier a friend and I had had almost the same discussion. We saw a similar whale from a boat I was operating in Alaska waters and most people identified it as a fin whale, but this one fellow suggested it could be a sei whale. I had never heard of sei whales, so I looked them up. What I learned was they have the same shape and almost the same size as a fin whale, averaging only about five feet shorter.  According to my source book, they are very difficult to differentiate from fin whales and the only way is in how they hold their tail flukes when they dive. Also according to that book, A Sea Guide to the Whales of the World by Lyall Watson, sei whales are found throughout all the world's oceans except the extreme Arctic and Antarctic waters.

None of that mattered to this guy who in front of a whole bunch of people told me I was wrong and to boot, stupid for thinking what I was thinking. At one point he said he didn't think sei whales went into Prince William Sound, a place we both had sailed in, but was about 2,000 miles north of us at the time. But then in frustration to my not bending down in homage and agreement he said very authoritatively that he had spent years in the Antarctic and there were no sei whales there. What that had to do with whales in the mid latitudes I don't know, but by that time I was embarrassed and fed up. I told him I didn't care if he had spent years on the moon, sei whales certainly could be where we were and this could have been a sei whale, and walked away. There comes a time when you just have to cash in your chips and get out any way you can.

Still that argument has lingered in my mind for the four or so years since it happened and every time I

Blue whale

Fin whale, you tell me

see the mention of a sei whale it comes up. I guess what bothers me is that this person who has since lost my friendship, had so little disregard for me or my knowledge or intellect that he could tell me in front of a bunch of people we barely knew that I was ignorant and stupid. I did eventually tell him he was wrong about sei whales but I never said absolutely that this whale was one, only that it could have been one and that he and others had identified it as a blue whale because they wanted it to be blue whale. They had wished it so.

In the long run it is silly and immature to let oneself be dragged into such an argument and to let that argument linger as anger in the psyche for so long. Perhaps just venting here will help let it go. And by the way, I will brook no arguments over this post; as they say on Facebook, LOL.

And perhaps for those who have read this far, you are now aware of yet another species of great whales endangered on the high seas.

I guess the southern tip of Chile doesn't count as being near Antarctica

Mission Blue petition to the United Nations to save sei whales

Milestones, logs and blogs

"Sea Guide to the Whales of the World"