'The Whale Song' Origin Story
Ronnie Mackie crossing the Atlantic
Ronnie Mackie and his band ‘Quarrel Brae’ have released a lovely tune - ‘The Whale Song’ - to help raise funds for a number of charities, HWDT included! The song was inspired by a conversation that Ronnie had with a whale while sailing across the Atlantic. Read Ronnie’s story of how he came to write the song below…
The first cetacean (the collective term for whales, dolphins and porpoises) species that I saw in Scotland was back in the late 1980s. A pod of bottlenose dolphins was frolicking in front of my house in Kinghorn, Fife. I had many more sightings of this group of marauders - an offshoot of the East Coast Population (or the Moray Firth group as they were known then) - as they became regular visitors to the Firth of Forth. I frequently recorded and sent in my observations from then on.
At the end of the 1990s I was lucky enough to win a competition with a group of local kids that I was working with. The kids got £250 to buy plants for their wildlife garden … and I got … a week on a basking shark research boat! It was definitely the moment that changed my life (again). That first week was filled with new discoveries; several species of cetacean as well as lots of sharks.
I became very good friends with the skipper, the legendary Colin Speedie (his book The Sea Monster's tale is one of the few interesting and informative books on the basking shark) and for the next few years I joined him every summer to monitor sharks among the Hebrides. When he decided to make the sea his home, I was often asked to crew for parts of his journey. I remember seeing common dolphins with him on a trip to the Scillies and an incredible feeding frenzy (with gannets, commons, tuna, etc) off the coast of Portugal. When we reached the southern coast of Portugal I celebrated with a swim, only to see two basking sharks cruise alongside as I pulled myself out of the water.
All this was just good practice for the big trip. In 2012, Colin asked me if I would like to accompany him and his wife on a sail across the Atlantic. We set out in December from the Cape Verde Islands, off the coast of Africa, onwards to Brazil. On the third day we were sailing along quietly in fairly benign conditions when, right in front of us, a sperm whale breached. It happened too suddenly for any of us to get a photograph, but the image has stayed with me to this day. The only photo that I have is of the distinctive sideways blow that we saw a few minutes later. That was the last that we saw of it.
The blow from the sperm whale - the only photographic evidence of the encounter which inspired ‘The Whale Song’
The rest of the trip was just as amazing in so many different ways but the image of the breaching whale haunted me. I was lying in my tiny cabin one night when it occurred to me that the sea was only a few centimeters away under my pillow … and it was very deep! I spent many of my off-duty hours lying thinking about the ocean and the whale, and how the ocean was being trashed. When we arrived in Brazil, I was seriously shocked when I saw that there were almost no trees as far as I could see. There were plenty of people, though, and they – like most of us – were heavy users of plastic products, some of which inevitably ended up in the sea.