Share this Story: Whale watching from land: A whole new perspective on the Route des Baleines
Whale watching from land: A whole new perspective on the Route des Baleines
If you want to see whales, you needn't bother chasing after them in a boat. Just pitch a tent by the water and wait for them to come to you
Alexander Gelfand • special to Montreal Gazette
Jul 25, 2015 • July 15, 2020 • 5 minute read • Join the conversation
All along the riverbank: Mer et Monde campsites offer spectacular views. Photo by Marc Loiselle
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If you want to see whales, you needn't bother chasing after them in a boat. Just pitch a tent by the water and wait for them to come to you.
That's what my wife, Ingrid, and I did last July when we took our young sons, Lazar and Django, camping at Mer et Monde, a somewhat rustic campground on the north shore of the St. Lawrence River just east of Tadoussac. There are plenty of other campgrounds in the area with more amenities, but Ingrid and I decided to make the six-hour drive from Montreal and suffer the absence of potable water and the predominance of pit toilets at Mer et Monde precisely because of its reputation for land-based whale watching — an activity that seemed so implausible, if not oxymoronic, that we just had to try it.
Whale watching from land: A whole new perspective on the Route des Baleines Back to video
As we learned, Mer et Monde is ideally placed along Quebec's Route des Baleines, or Whale Route, a nearly 1,000-kilometre-long stretch of the St. Lawrence littoral that sees large numbers of migrating whales from May through October. The combination of cold, salty water from the St. Lawrence estuary and highly oxygenated freshwater from the adjoining Saguenay River supports a massive population of krill, and the bottom falls away so sharply that the enormous cetaceans — beluga, minke, fin, humpback and even the occasional blue whale — can dive for food just offshore. (Scuba divers, too, can simply jump in at various public access points without having to venture further out by boat.) Many of its campsites are located so close to the river that you might be tempted to take a dip, if the water temperature weren't 4 degrees Celsius in the middle of summer.
Within half an hour of setting up our two tents, the four of us were sitting on a rocky outcropping by the water's edge, watching a beluga and a minke cruise through the waves at twilight before reluctantly tearing ourselves away for a meal of canned spaghetti and 's'mores. Just before dawn, Ingrid awoke to the unmistakable sound of a whale spouting water from its blowhole, the exhalation so loud that she initially thought it was coming from inside our tent. Within a few hours, a dense fog had rolled in across the St. Lawrence, but the show was by no means over: we could hear, if not always see, a group of whales moving around us, their breathing punctuating the otherwise tranquil scene like a series of minor explosions.
There was a time when beluga in particular were much harder to find along the St. Lawrence, having been pushed to extinction by over-hunting. In the 1970s, however, the Canadian government called an end to commercial whaling and banned beluga hunting of any kind on the river. And in 1989, the federal and provincial governments together established the Saguenay-St. Lawrence Marine Park, a protected zone that has spurred the growth of ecotourism in the region.
Mer et Monde is on the southern edge of the small town of Bergeronnes, at the end of a long dirt road that leads off the main highway. But we had similarly close terrestrial encounters with cetaceans at two of the three easy-to-find facilities that Parks Canada maintains nearby: the Marine Discovery Centre, in the tiny town of Les Escoumins; and the Interpretation and Observation Centre, in the equally tiny town of Cap de Bon-Désir. Both feature exhibits on the history and ecology of the area; both are staffed by naturalists who switch easily between French and English, though as a native Montrealer I was required to translate every now and then for my American-born kids; and both allow visitors to wander the riverbank, an alien landscape of tan granite boulders worn smooth by the tides, either alone or with a guide. When asked which had the best land-based whale watching, the campground or the well-appointed centres, a naturalist at the Marine Discovery Centre simply shrugged. "It's the same coast, and they're the same whales," he said, moments before we spotted a fin whale — the second largest species in the world — preparing for a deep dive, its deceptively small dorsal fin slicing through the surface of the water again and again as the creature gathered its breath.
Even when rain and fog made sightings difficult, there was plenty to do. At Les Escoumins, we got to hang out with a couple of divers, as ungainly as astronauts in their stiff drysuits, who had just crawled out of the frigid river after spending some time among the kind of smaller aquatic creatures (anemones, crabs) that we'd seen inside the Marine Discovery Centre. And we watched a video interview with a former whaler who gave an engrossing account (in French, with English subtitles) of how he and his colleagues once herded and slaughtered the animals in droves.
At Cap de Bon-Désir, we explored a museum dedicated to the beautifully maintained red-and-white lighthouse that dominates the inland portion of the site before descending to the rocky shore for a guided tour of the flora and fauna that inhabit the local tide pools. (Much to the delight of Lazar and Django, we discovered that the Whale Route overlaps in part with the Lighthouse Route. We explored that, too, on our way to meet a bunch of moose at Gaspésie National Park on the south shore of the river — but that's another story.) It wasn't long, however, before excited cries of "une baleine!" interrupted our guide's disquisition on algae and periwinkles, and all eyes turned to yet another minke as it passed within hailing distance.
Curiosity did compel us to take a whale-watching tour on a specially designed cruiser out of Baie-Ste-Catherine, which sits a short ferry ride from Tadoussac on the other side of the majestic Saguenay River Fjord. But while we all agreed that it was fun to take a ride on a vessel whose heated passenger cabin boasted floor-to-ceiling windows — and also fun to ride the ferry, which provided stunning views of the looming, tree-covered walls of the only fjord in North America, carved by a glacier more than a billion years ago — it was also completely unnecessary. The cruiser was crowded, we had to fight our way to the railings in order to see the whales, and we were rarely able to get close enough to spot them before they disappeared; at one point, we spent half an hour searching for a humpback that never broke the surface.
As unlikely as it seems, we saw more from dry land than we did from the water.