He Promised Me a Big One

The sea was angry that day. Really. It was. Thankfully, the whale didn’t mind. A whale you say? Yes, a whale and not just any whale, but a Pacific gray whale. It was the first verified sighting in the Western Atlantic.

Why, you may ask, would a whale – whose species was hunted to extinction on our side of the globe centuries ago – travel thousands of miles through the frigid Northwest Passage, miraculously appearing in the waters off South Florida shores, only to reveal itself to you and your son? Maybe because we were the only crazies out in six-foot swells? Was it a fluke or perhaps, just perhaps, the whale knew we were due a miracle?

The preceding week, we attended the memorial for our son’s 32-year-old best friend, Capt. Kevin Cote, a mechanical miracle worker with an infectious smile who could fix anything that floats. Tragically, even the MD Anderson cancer team couldn’t give Kevin the miracle he needed. Our son, Capt. Abie Raymond, who prides himself on his positive mental attitude, understandably took Kevin’s loss hard, causing his normal luster to dull a bit. Losing a best friend will do that to you. As for me, I won’t bore anyone with the details, but let’s just say I was feeling my age for the first time in my life … and I didn’t like it.

Despite our melancholy and the ginormous waves, my birthday fishing trip was on. Abie asked what I wanted to catch.

“Cobia. Wahoo. Grouper – a big one!” I responded, and he planned accordingly.

When your son’s a charter boat captain, these conversations are not merely aspirational.

When we set out of Haulover Marina on the Go Hard it was 51 degrees, windy and I was wearing four layers of clothes. Abie opined weather conditions might bring a whale shark into view. An unprecedented pod of more than 100 dolphins magically appeared alongside us as we caught bait.

We fished the third reef of the morning. Abie asked if I wanted to try another location or head inshore to catch snook, which for the record we did later in the day. Now, here’s where the magic continued. Usually, I wouldn’t dream of making my hardworking son work harder, but something made me say yes to one more spot.

We dropped lines in 280 feet of water off a Golden Beach reef. A 10-foot

man-eating, silky shark popped up off our stern, hoping to pilfer our catch. We were discussing said shark when Abie’s expression morphed into one that I can only compare to having your face licked by puppies while riding a wooden roller coaster: “Dad! There’s a huge whale out there!! Like a real whale!!”

Abie, a man of action, instructed me to quickly reel in my line so we could follow it. That’s when the whale spouted. Abie and I exchanged looks of amazement and pondered the whale’s species. We set off in pursuit, the whale going about its business at 10 knots, us at a respectable distance.

Abie headed up the boat tower, a small platform 12 feet above deck. He asked me carefully, “Are you comfortable climbing up? It’ll be an amazing view.”

I’ve been in his tower several times, but never in enormous swells. Before I could overthink it, adrenaline propelled me up the tiny steps as if I were 16. I had just wedged myself into the railing when the whale surfaced again.

Its back, as unique as human fingerprints, was covered with barnacles, had a series of knobs behind its dorsal ridge and was a mottled gray. I was mesmerized. Abie had his wits about him, was filming on his phone and reminded me to do the same. I clung to the railing, retrieved my phone and hit video. The whale spouted, slipped scarcely beneath the surface and swam toward us, turning the tables on our voyeurism.

It was almost noon. The sun shimmered through the cobalt sea illuminating the whale’s underwater silhouette in an indescribable shade of aqua. In a thrilling interspecies exchange of curiosity, the whale passed under us, dazzling us with its immensity of nearly twice the boat’s length. The whale surfaced once more, spouted and with a flick of its tail, vanished beneath the waves.

As we elatedly postulated its species, we uploaded videos to social media requesting whale identification. I proposed it was a right whale, however the coloration and shape seemed off. Abie thought it might be a humpback. Neither species live here.

As background, we’ve both been fortunate enough to see many, many whales. In fact, I always suspected our son, who wanted to be a fishing guide since age 3, was part dolphin. He can’t stay out of the water. While other kids played video games, Abie fished, attended fishing and marine biology camps, and fished some more. If the ocean was rough, he surfed or fished the ’glades. He drove boats before cars, got his captain’s license at 19 and for the last 16 years has spent a minimum of 200 days a year fishing offshore. The closest Abie came to seeing a “real whale” near Miami was 35 miles offshore, near Bimini, where he happened upon a pod of sperm whales.

My first government job was as an environmental laboratory technician testing Miami’s ocean waters. I also taught middle school marine biology and have owned some type of watercraft since age 11. I’ve been graced to see a multitude of whales, dolphins, manatees and assorted sea mammals from the Caribbean to Alaska to New Zealand, and on every occasion, I fall into a state of science geek rapture.

Following our sighting in late December, the state’s whale biologist called. Geek heaven!! Amongst other things, we discussed DNA evidence demonstrating how Pacific gray whales migrated through the Canadian Artic Archipelago into the Atlantic until the 1800s, when the ice wasn’t as solid as it became in the 1900s. Presently, the ice is melting again, permitting “our” whale to travel here. Science shows climate change is cyclical, with humans accelerating these cycles exponentially.

I joked with the biologist that coincidentally, “Time Noir,” my latest science-fiction novel, prophesied an orca and narwhal visiting Miami Beach. In my book, the cetaceans were aliens, as was our whale in a sense, a stranger in a strange sea, which brought the conversation to a deeper level, contemplating whether ours was a wayward whale or a pioneer in search of new territory?

Or perhaps, just perhaps, it was a sign from Capt. Kevin, another magical being who migrated to our shores by way of Canada, reminding us that miracles do exist.

David Raymond is a resident of Biscayne Park and bestselling author of humorous science-fiction and fantasy novels set in his native Miami. Prior to a public service career directing large governmental social service systems, Raymond taught marine biology and was an environmental laboratory technician testing Miami’s Ocean waters.