Croisière Baie de Gaspé: A precious collaboration

All along the saint-Lawrence, MICS is lucky to have allies and friends who help a lot for covering as much ground as possible during the summer months. In Gasésie for example, we work for several years with the Croisières Baie de Gaspé organisation which each summer, offers whale-watching tours on their boat, the Narval III. This collaboration is very valuable for the research station, thus we receive whale ID pictures all summer, and we share with them all the information we have on the observed whales.

A routine has been established with their great team :

Every morning, Jean Roy head to the Cap Bon Ami to scope, looking for the tall spouts. It is not rare that Jean calls us on the radio (if we are on the water in the area at that time) to give us his scoping results. When he is not available, Laurent Juneau is taking over! Afterwards, the Narval III leaves the harbour of Grande-Grave (1 to 3 times a day, depending on the timing in the summer) and head for the spouts seen by Jean in the morning, or by our team. We therefore have several great observers on the water : Guy Synnott and Marc-André Charbonneau (captains), Stacey Cassivi and Marc Trudel (guides on board). When we have a team working in Gaspésie, we work closely with them, on their side they can share the whales histories with their tourists.

When we are not around, Stacey is in charge of taking pictures in order to get the information of the whales around. The research station lent her a digital camera for that. From those pictures (linked with GPS data, dive frequencies, etc.), we are able to follow-up on the use of the Gaspe Peninsula by humpbacks, fins and blue whales.

One more situation remains where this collaboration is important: sometimes, Jean would call at the station in Longue-pointe-de-mingan and say we have so many whales observations, you should come and check this, in this case we prepare a boat, organise a team and get the gear ready to join our partners on this beautiful peninsula.

A special thanks to Jean, Guy, Marc-André, Laurent, Stacey and Marc from the « Croisières Baie de Gaspé » but also to Steve Cloutier from the « Bateaux de croisières Julien Cloutier » for your welcome, your presence on the water every day, your help and your pictures.