Sri Lanka: Mirissa – Whale Watching Tour

🐋 Whale Watching in Sri Lanka — A Cautionary Tale

We have been on quite a few whale watching tours over the years and, hand on heart, we have loved nearly every single one of them. I can clearly remember my very first outing, out on California’s Monterey Bay — one of the richest stretches of ocean on the planet, sitting atop the Monterey Canyon, a vast underwater gorge that funnels cold, nutrient-rich water up to the surface and keeps the local wildlife very well fed. I remember the tears welling up the moment a pod of orcas broke the surface not far from the boat. Grown man. Crying on a boat. Excellent. But there it was.

Since that first trip, we have done well over a dozen of these tours in various corners of the world, and in all that time, not once did we feel we were disturbing or endangering the animals. The operators we had dealt with had clearly taken their responsibilities seriously, keeping a respectful distance and letting the whales do their thing on their own terms. A thoroughly decent bunch, all of them.

So we went into the Mirissa experience with reasonable confidence.

The primary whale watching season out of Mirissa — a small fishing port on Sri Lanka’s southern coast, which only really got itself on the tourist map in the early 2000s — runs from November through to April. The tours themselves last somewhere between four and five hours. The big draw, as you might expect, is the blue whale: the largest animal ever to have existed on Earth, tipping the scales at up to 200 tonnes and stretching to around 30 metres in length. They are genuinely extraordinary creatures, and southern Sri Lanka sits along one of their known migratory routes. There are also fin whales, Bryde’s whales, sperm whales, and various species of dolphins knocking about if you are lucky.

All the tours depart Mirissa harbour somewhere between 6 am and 7 am, which is not ideal for those of us whose bodies have quietly given up the fight against time zones. The reason for the early start is that there is an official moratorium on whale watching in the afternoons — a rule introduced to give the whales a bit of peace and quiet during the hotter part of the day. Quite right too. It takes a good while to reach the feeding grounds, which are well out into open ocean. And open ocean means proper swells. If you are the sort of person who goes green at the sight of a rowing boat, do yourself a favour and take something for seasickness before you board.

The day we went out, it was grey and drizzly — not ideal conditions at all, because the main method of spotting whales is watching for the tall, misty plume of water they blow from their blowholes when they surface. On a flat, bright day you can see these spouts from considerable distance. On a grey, choppy day it is considerably harder work. What also did not help was the sheer number of other boats out there. At one point I counted something in the region of twenty to thirty vessels of various shapes and sizes all doing exactly what we were doing. That was the first sign that something was not quite right.

After a while, our crew spotted a spout and we were off, engines opened up, and we got to the spot ahead of most of the pack. It turned out to be a Bryde’s whale — pronounced “Broodus,” since you ask, and named after Johan Bryde, a Norwegian who helped establish the first whaling station in South Africa back in the early 1900s, which is a somewhat ironic footnote given the circumstances. Bryde’s whales can reach around 15 metres in length and weigh up to 44 tonnes. It skimmed the surface for a few moments, utterly magnificent, and then slipped silently back beneath the waves. And then the cavalry arrived. Every single other boat descended on the spot like seagulls on a dropped chip. It was a deeply uncomfortable thing to witness.

Not long after, another spout was spotted and the whole flotilla surged off in pursuit. This time it was a fin whale — the second-largest animal on the planet after the blue whale, reaching up to 27 metres and weighing around 70 tonnes. The blue whales, which are the whole point of coming here, were apparently somewhere else that day, because we did not see a single one. What we did see was every tour boat in southern Sri Lanka forming a slow, grinding circle around this one fin whale, trapping it in a ring of engines and hulls and people waving cameras about. I have been trying to think of the correct collective noun for a group of whale watching tour boats behaving like this, and I have settled on a “menace.” A menace of tour boats. I switched my camera off. I did not want any part of it. In hindsight, I rather wish I had filmed the boats instead — because that was the story worth telling.

After a couple of hours of this, we headed back to Mirissa. The other tourists on board seemed, for the most part, perfectly happy with how things had gone. Which, if I am honest, made me even more irritated than I already was.

We were not happy bunnies. Not even slightly.

I cannot in good conscience recommend the whale watching tours out of Mirissa. Sri Lanka is a wonderful country in so many other respects, but this particular experience left a sour taste. There are far better, far more responsibly managed whale watching operations elsewhere in the world — places where the animals are given the space and the dignity they deserve. Southern Sri Lanka is simply not one of them. Not yet, anyway.