Summary
JIM Crumley is describing his first close-up encounter with humpback whales, in Alaska. "One came right alongside the boat," he tells me, "and you're looking down into the vent, and the smell's not very nice, but a little while after the vent, this eyeball comes along and it's four inches across. It really felt as if it was making eye contact and it was the most extraordinary feeling - as if this thing had sought me out for a reason which I couldn't begin to imagine, then discussing it with the other people in the boat after we got ashore, and everybody else had felt the same."
That was ten years ago when Crumley, a highly regarded Scottish nature writer and broadcaster, was on his first visit to Alaska, while making a programme for Radio 4. "It did change my life," he recalls. "There's no question about it, getting up-close and personal with humpbacks."See the full content of this document
Extract
The Christmas Whale
His Alaskan experiences returned to possess him a couple of years ago when Crumley, who lives in Balquhidder but grew up in Dundee, discovered that it had been a humpback whale which in November 1883 swam up the Firth of Tay and into his hometown's annals, not to mention a famous poem by Scotland's best-loved bad poet, William McGonagall. Unfortunately, in resolvin...
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