An equation: Take one week with grey whale researchers, multiply by eight hours per day in a 22′ aluminium skiff, add 3′ swells on the open Pacific, and you have one seasick traveller. On the first day, I puked once over the side of the boat. Every day following began with my breakfast of Gravol, the only solution to a week of nauseous misery.

Despite the seasickness, spending my days looking at whales was like a damp version of heaven. I could not get enough of it: I loved scanning the horizon for the telltale puff of white blown above the surface of the water, and scooting around wild green islands and rocky points.

Based in a creaky 100-year-old wooden home across from the Nuu-chah-nulth village of Ahousaht, our days at the University of Victoria Whale Lab had a certain rhythm. After listening to the marine weather forecast at dawn, we’d tumble out of our bunk beds, scramble into bulky nylon survival suits and rubber boots, wait in line to use the washroom, and then stagger down the wooden dock to the boat carrying dry bags and plastic gear boxes filled with equipment.

I worked mostly with Laura-Joan, a masters’ student studying gray whale foraging in Clayoquot Sound. Some days we spent surveying, noting the location and number of whales we spotted. Other days we trailed a sonar device through a mapped area and scooped samples of mysids, small crustaceans that were the primary food for whales in the area. (I even ate one – a bit wriggly and salty).

As big as buses, the whales were quietly busy feeding off the south-west shore of the island, just at the edge of the open ocean. They’d surface for air, breathe about 8 times, then take a deep dive to the bottom (signalled by two tail flukes lifted high in the air) where they’d start scooping boatloads of small crustaceans into their mouths. Each time the whales went below the surface of the water, they left behind a round, flat pancake of displaced water, called a “dive puddle”. When they surfaced to breathe, their huge, dark snouts and back slid easily through the waves, giving us a glimpse of the large, white barnacles clustered on their dark skin (they carry several hundred pounds of parasitic barnacles and sea lice on their bodies).