Whale of a tale

Man meets whale

My friend Bob went out on a boat. He’s a thin guy, but he came back flatter.

Bob & Vicki went out on Gerry’s new 27’ Bayliner. A beauty of a boat, and its maiden voyage was out in beautiful Santa Barbara Harbor. A perfect day full of whale watchers and grey whales.

Once they got out a little ways, enjoying a legendary Santa Barbara fall afternoon on the water, Bob noticed a large shape dive close by.

He called out to Gerry, “a whale sounded pretty close to the boat. You might want to watch where we’re going?”

Gerry asked, “Where’d it go down?”

Bob pointed, “over the….” and Bob’s world got very dark. A mother grey whale surfaced and leapt up at exactly the point Bob was pointing, blotting out sky, ocean and everything else from Bob’s consciousness except dark. As he was going down, Bob looked up to see Gerry getting knocked off the pilothouse, and the pilothouse getting shattered. He felt himself being pushed toward the back of the boat, knowing that no one was at the controls to stop the props. He didn’t want to end up chum in the harbor and tried to fight the great weight pushing him aft, pushing him towards those sharp, spinning props.

For Gerry’s part, as he went down, he saw Bob’s face framed in the whale’s flukes. In other circumstances, it might have been a funny picture.

As Bob’s body, ribs cracking, was pushed into the railing, the weight of the whale caused the boat to keel partway over. The whale rolled off Bob and off the boat. Bob took his first breath in a minute, and wished he hadn’t as the cracked ribs punctured his lung.

When the grey rolled off, it came back to the boat & rubbed its fluke al the way down its length before diving to join its calf.

Moments later, a whale-watching boat happened by. People on the boat leaned over to get a better look, and to take pictures of the wrecked boat and the potential tragedy of the skinny guy with the long black hair gasping for breath in the bottom of the boat, amidst the blubber & flesh the behemoth had left behind. As Bob was later told me, “there was enough whale meat left behind to have a barbecue for everyone on the boat and their families on the shore.” But then the boat went on by.

Another minute or two and some heroes in Coast Guard uniforms came upon the scene. They pushed Bob across the deck onto a stretcher and took him to a local hospital. They cut off his clothes and found 10 or 20 pounds of whale blubber inside.

His pal, Gerry the boat owner, was not badly injured. Miraculously, Bob’s wife Vicki sustained not even a scratch. Bob & Vicki’s phone had 128 messages from the media the next day.

As Gerry stood by Bob’s bedside in the hospital, the phone rang yet again. “Bob,” it’s the Montel Williams show. They want to talk with you.”

“I…..can’t….barely breathe….don’t want….to…..talk.”

“He doesn’t want to talk to you right now.”

The phone answered, “But everyone wants to talk to Montel.”

This apparently had immediate but temporary curative effects, for Bob was able to growl out an entire sentence, “F**k Montel!”

The story went into the papers, Bob came back to work after a little while, leaning on a cane, trying not to laugh, or otherwise breathe too much.

It’s hard to believe, for (I am told) only two other people have ever survived being landed on by a whale!

I was talking to Vicki in her shop, The Silver Gypsy. What was it like? I wondered.

“Well, it was scary. And it was over almost before I could react. I still can hardly believe it. And it was the first time I had ever been out in deep water in a boat! So, as it turns out, 100% of the time I’ve been out in a boat, some giant water creature landed on it!”

Interesting odds...

“Yes,” she said, “if I ever go out in a boat again, it’s going to be at Loch Ness. And I’m taking a camera.

By the way - the Silver Gypsy in Santa Maria, California has every kind of cool and unusual little perfume, knife, incense, herb, figurine – “gifts for the soul.” And everything a happy pagan might want as well. You should give it a visit if you’re ever in town. And let one-in-a-billion Bob or Vicki tell you a real whale tail.