Another Life: It took the fine spell to remind us how really flat the sea could be, even here on our western shores. High pressure smoothed it to a mirror for the sails of sudden and magical yachts, swan-white and russet, writes Michael Viney.
This was also the best possible sea for watching whales and dolphins, snatched out of space by telescopes propped on likely heights. Imagine the ocean 200 years ago, before the whalers got to work: what incredible spectacles one might have seen: such spouting, lunging and leaping! Thus can science feed one's dreams.
Only weeks ago I was writing of the research - reputable stuff - suggesting that nine-tenths of the planet's big, predatory fish (tuna, swordfish, marlin and so on) have vanished from most parts of the oceans. Now we have equally shocking calculations about whales.
Geneticists at Stanford and Harvard have been working out the past populations of three north Atlantic species: humpback, fin and minke. With almost 1,000 DNA samples, they calculated how many females would have been needed in the past to account for the current genetic diversity.
This led them to quite startling population estimates. They think that some 240,000 humpback whales once swam the north Atlantic - 12 times as many as previous estimates and 24 times the number surviving today. There were, perhaps, 360,000 of the big fin whale - six times as many as now - and 265,000 minke, compared to 149,000 today.
That's another set of figures to encourage the anti-whaling nations in the International Whaling Commission, whose 1986 moratorium on commercial whaling, agreed 17 years ago, is under constant strain. Its rules allow whaling to be considered again if populations rise above half the ocean's "carrying capacity" - its theoretical ability to support a given number of whales. Just at the time when it could be argued, on other sets of figures, that the humpback may be touching the hunting threshold, while the fin and minke have already passed it, the new historic picture sets humpback and fin a long way back in recovery.
This leaves the north Atlantic minke, Ireland's commonest inshore whale in summer, most exposed to commercial ambitions, and to the attentions of "scientific" whaling. Compared to Japan's quite cynical claim of research in its annual slaughter of hundreds of plankton-feeding minke in the Antarctic, and Norway's hunting of minke in spite of the moratorium, the current harpooning of 38 minke by Iceland's Marine Research Institute can indeed be described as "a minimalist approach".
But it does confront the European conscience, at least, with basic ethical questions on human exploitation of the ocean. Is killing of the sea's mammals always wrong or just when (a) the means are excessively brutal, as in the explosive harpoons aboard the three Icelandic whalers; (b) the species is endangered; (c) the competition for fish between whales and people can be still accommodated by national economies and the human appetite for fish fingers?
Iceland, which last hunted whales in 1987, believes the minke, in particular, is eating too many cod and wants more evidence from the animals' stomachs to build a scientific case. It is the smallest of the baleen whales: a slender 10-tonne animal no more than nine metres from pointed nose to tail. The fibrous sieves in its mouth certainly filter out plankton - especially the krill of Arctic waters - but the minke also lunges expertly after fish ("herring hog" was one traditional name in Ireland).
The Marine Research Institute estimates that minke feeding on Iceland's continental shelf (where they earn a good and rapidly growing income from whale-watching tourism) now number 45-50,000. Of the two million tonnes of seafood they eat in a year, only 35 per cent is krill. If only 3 per cent of their diet is cod, says the Institute, this could still have "considerable impact" on Iceland's fishery prospects.
The protest against Iceland's action is driven by a proper human anguish about cruelty and animal suffering: explosive harpoons are hideous weapons. But even if death came laser-quick, a generation reared on whalesong and deep-sea documentaries has come to feel a special relationship with the mammals of the sea.
When the International Whaling Commission met in Berlin in June, it adopted a proposal which gives it an entirely new direction. From an organisation created in 1946 to regulate the hunting of whales, it has become one committed to their conservation (a move which, unfortunately, may drive nations such as Japan, Iceland and Norway into breaking away as "ocean ecosystem managers"). In this new context, Ireland's creation of a whale and dolphin sanctuary, in 1991, could become a model for other maritime nations.
Recent sightings from Ireland's whale-watchers suggest that migrating humpbacks are getting the message. On August 12th, they were confirmed feeding - even, perhaps, bubble-netting (surrounding fish with a wall of bubbles) - south of Kilmore Quay, Co Wexford, and off Loop Head, Co Clare.
For the latest sightings and full species accounts, visit the Irish Whale and Dolphin Group website at www.iwdg.ie.