STATE OF ALEUTIAN
Sailing out of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy in Russia’s Far East, I’d never seen a blue whale. I still haven’t. Sensed one? Certainly – close enough to touch, though shrouded in a fog so thick it swallowed your breath. I heard her, too: an explosion of wet air, epic as it was sudden, like a giant snorkel being cleared.
A few minutes earlier, the captain of French cruise line Ponant’s had alerted us to the whale’s presence over the PA system. The ship almost lists
