As you may by now have guessed, John's immediate response to my mouth's brainless suggestion was to smile broadly and proclaim, "That might work! Go for it!" Now, I wanted to explain to him that I'm really more of an idea man, but everyone was staring at me expectantly. I fidgeted a little while my brain went into high gear. Of all the reasons I could think of why such a plan was sheer madness, surely there had to be one that I could use that would not make me look like a total wuss. My brain was cranking feverishly, frantically considering one excuse after another, and while it was busy doing that, the mouth, true to form, butted in with: "Sure! Get me in as close as you can."

In retrospect, John was probably not serious, and in fact was probably utterly flabbergasted that his guest would actually entertain such an insane notion. He was keen, of course, on getting the whale to shore for study, so he brought the Zodiac in until its bottom scraped the rocks (and the knees and butts of everyone inside). I stood on the alarmingly springy and bouncy hull, took a deep breath, and jumped.

The whale itself was the equal of the Zodiac in terms of springiness, but nowhere near as stable. It was rolling alarmingly from side to side with the motion of the waves, and after the initial bounce of my landing I found myself clinging for dear life to its throat pleats. Thank goodness for those long, square ridges of rubber that the Creator saw fit to install on the undersides of whales! I hooked the toes of my boots between two of them and gripped as firmly as I could with my gloved hands. The beast was rocking so violently I started to think it was still alive and was trying to buck me off. Somehow I managed to grab the line that they threw to me. As you may have seen in the photograph I was laying sideways across the whale's chest. The idea was for me to loop the rope around its pectoral fin.

The whale was not cooperative. More than once I could not pull my cold-numbed arm from the water in time before it rolled back, squashing my arm tightly between its body and its monstrous fin. I suppose it was a blessing at that point that I could not feel anything below my shoulder. I can't remember how many attempts I made, but it took a long time. The folks in the Zodiac were beginning to dispair (after giggling for quite a while at my efforts and snapping a lot of pictures), but finally through some miracle I pulled my arm out of the water during one roll and found the end of the rope clutched in my hand. Both were an equal shade of greenish-blue at that point.

"Good job!" John shouted. "Now secure the rope and hang on."

I groaned inwardly. Here I was, after a harrowing ride on a pitching little rubber thing, about to take what was bound to be another harrowing ride on a pitching big rubber thing that smelled. My frozen fingers made what knot they could in the rope. I waved a go-ahead to John and hung on tightly. John gunned the engine, kicking up a huge spray of foam behind the Zodiac.

The whale did not budge. In the time it had taken for me to secure the line to its fin the tide had gone out just a few precious tenths of an inch, and that was enough to maroon the carcass quite thoroughly on the rocks. John tried over and over from different angles, and then finally pronounced it a hopeless task. "We'll just have to secure it and then come back for it when the tide comes back in," he said. Then he looked toward me, and at the tips of the rocks that were now showing above the waves and preventing the Zodiac from coming in any closer. "I say!" he shouted. "It looks like you're stuck out there."

This did not amuse me. I was not about to spend twelve hours on the rotting corpse of a whale while the tide did its thing. The shore suddenly looked a lot closer, and with all the rocks around I figured that it would be duck soup to skip my way across them and get to shore. Besides, I had a survival suit on. It would keep me nicely toasty warm if I fell into the water, right. Emboldened by the thought, I crawled down to where the whale's tail vanished into the water, and made a jump for it.

Whales, when dead, and possibly even when alive, are amazingly slimy animals. Rocks, too, freshly exposed by the tide, are equally slimy. There was thus not a single square inch of exposed surface that was not coated with a generous layer of slippery goop. Suffice it to say that I did not exactly skip nimbly across the rocks to shore. In fact, by the time I finally dragged myself out of the water I was quite soaked from the chest down. And the survival suit? I discovered that its name means exactly what it says. It was never meant to keep you warm. It promises only to keep you alive, and even then only barely. My sense of touch was completely gone. I couldn't see straight. I couldn't hear anything but ringing in my ears. The only sense that was still working was my sense of smell, and it was working overtime, since the whale had kindly gifted me with a generous coating of its aroma before my departure.

I really don't remember the ride home. I only recall that we had to throw away my watch because the smell wouldn't come out of it.

I have not seen a whale close up since then. In fact, I have not clapped eyes on any sea mammal since that day, since whenever one is around I have instant flashbacks: I am riding Mr. Zombie Whale through the icy waters while filling my nostrils with his most memorable aroma. It is an effective aversion therapy that I heartily recommend to anyone who has developed an allergy to sea mammals, although interestingly enough it was not enough to keep me from trying to eat a seal later in that trip.