2006/09/02 Whale Farts

Did you know that whales fart?  Well, they must.

At first I though it was Carlos.  (He's the pirate standing next to me in the  blue Club Fat Ass t-shirt.) The evening before our attempt at running the Juan de Fuca Marine Trail, the boys went out to Buffy's Pub in Sooke, BC and we stuffed our faces.  Carlos had a humungous plate of liver and onions and a couple of pale ales.  Add 12 hours, pile on a bunch of gels, some bagel and some jalapeno beef jerky and you have all of the ingredients for a bad case of gas.  He was a natural... but he wasn't the skunk.

I didn't think it could be Berglind. She's such a small woman and this was a powerful smell.  Besides, I've been told that women don't fart, so it couldn't be her.

True, a skunk smells it's own smell first and I have been known to generate some brutal methane, but this time it wasn't me, either.  

So there we were:  Berglind, Carlos and me in the middle of nowhere on a rocky outcropping on Sombrio Point with trees behind us and the Pacific Ocean in front of us, and one bad smell circulating around us.  Then we saw the whales.  Three of them, in fact.  We could almost reach out and touch them, they were so close to us. You can see 2 of them in the photo if you look closely.

What an amazing sight it was to behold.  Certainly the highlight of my running this year!  

So now that the source of the foul wind has been identified, can anyone clarify which orifice a whale farts from?