Working on a lobster boat out of Rustico Harbour, Prince Edward Island for three consecutive summers, I had the opportunity to do a lot of whale watching. We sometimes had to shut off the motor while a pod of North Atlantic Wright Whales were playfully swimming around the boat, sometimes floating in a vertical manner (head up, rear down, as opposed to swimming horizontally). It is the law that you must turn off your boat's engines, and the propellers, until the whales have sauntered off of their own free will.
What really got me were the baby whales. They would float in that right-side-up manner, in an almost stationary pose, and allow me to reach out and stroke them on their noses and spouts. Staring into the eyes of a whale at such close proximity is nothing short of life-altering. You have to imagine that these mammals have been swimming the same routes in the same waters for thousands of years, and when you stare into their eyes, you feel that you see an intelligence there.
Those were the days, when I was getting paid to sit in a boat, or to lean over the rails and be close to whales in their natural environment. Nobody around to tell me not to reach over the boat to pet the pretty little fishy. We were in a 42-foot fibreglass lobster boat, with retrofits so that it could be used as a deep-sea fishing charter boat. The whales, unfortunately, were only close enough to the island during early Spring and late Fall, but a few hours' drive away was the infamous Bay of Fundy, and it's amazing tidal bores.
The Bay of Fundy is a whale-watchers' paradise, with, some days, four or five different species of whale to be seen, floated amongst and played with. As for slipping out of the boat and swimming with the whales, the water in the Bay of Fundy normally hovers around the 55 degree mark, in the warmer months of late Summer. With the most powerful tides in the World, and the geography of the bay, the bottom of the Ocean is churned up with the tide, twice a day, and all the plankton and nutrient-rich water attracts up to 15 species of whales and four species of dolphins.
The Bay of Fundy has shown me the Baleen Whale, the Finback Whale (up to 90 tons and 80 feet long), and the World's largest mammal, on land and water, the Blue Whale. The Blue Whale can grow to 110 feet long, and weigh as much as 190 tons! That is one big fish! (I know, it's a mammal, but it's still a big fish!).
The average Blue whales that we saw on the excursions that I took out into the Bay of Fundy, and the ones that I saw from the shores of South-Western Nova Scotia (the entrance to the Bay of Fundy), were mainly from babies of 20 to 40 feet long, to mammals of about 80 feet long. When one of these whales crests the water in a twisting jump, it is truly an awe-inspiring sight, one well worth the cost of admission!
With whale species book identification chart and binoculars in hand, I would sit along the rocks on the shores of the Bay of Fundy, and watch the dolphins play and the whales breach. Early morning and early evening are the best times to catch sight of pods of whales from the shoreline of Nova Scotia, on the Bay of Fundy side. Sometimes, the whales will come within 30 to 40 feet of the shore, where the deep drop-offs are, and the bait-fish are plentiful.
So, if you want to see whales, both from paid charter boats and from seaside seats, Nova Scotia and the Bay of Fundy is the most populous area for whales in the entire world. Oh, and you can see the whales from the New Brunswick side of the Bay as well, just not so readily from shore.