text: We spun around, and aaaah, dear heavens, it wasnt a breaking wave at all, although a wave was breaking, instead it was my old friend Missus Fishbreath breaking the surface just behind the boat, and breaking my heart with the slow-moving stillness of her majestic beauty, a great gray whale dancing her way three thousand miles from the tropics to Alaska. As we turned and gaped, we were looking her right in the eye, and then she rolled our way and opened her blowhole so close to the boat we could almost look down it, it was as big as a dinner plate, we were close, close enough to count the barnacles clinging to her hull, she was the very picture of natural wildness and glorious beauty and unimaginable power, my heart leapt to see it ... and she blew out a great cloud of gagging mist, a noxious enveloping adherent miasma reeking of the million vanished piscatorial souls of her most recent months meals, a clogging, thick effluvium that enveloped the boat and then drifted away to leeward as the lovely lady disappeared beneath the waves ...