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Book Reviewed by:The true story of long-distance swimmer Lynne Cox's ocean encounter with an 18-foot baby whale and her efforts to reunite "Grayson" with his mother - part mystery, part magical tale.
Grayson is Lynne Cox's first book since
Swimming to Antarctica ("Riveting"—Sports
Illustrated; "Pitch-perfect"—Outside). In
it she tells the story of a miraculous ocean
encounter that happened to her when she was
seventeen and in training for a big swim (she had
already swum the English Channel, twice, and the
Catalina Channel).
It was the dark of early morning; Lynne was in
55-degree water as smooth as black ice, two hundred
yards offshore, outside the wave break. She was
swimming her last half-mile back to the pier before
heading home for breakfast when she became aware
that something was swimming with her. The ocean was
charged with energy as if a squall was moving in;
thousands of baby anchovy darted through the water
like lit sparklers, trying to evade something
larger. Whatever it was, it felt large enough to be
a white shark coursing beneath her body.
It wasn't a shark. It became clear that it was a
baby gray whale—following alongside Lynne for a mile
or so. Lynne had been swimming for more than an
hour; she needed to get out of the water to rest,
but she realized that if she did, the young calf
would follow her onto shore and die from collapsed
lungs.
The baby whale—eighteen feet long!—was migrating on
a three-month trek to its feeding grounds in the
Bering Sea, an eight-thousand-mile journey. It would
have to be carried on its mother's back for much of
that distance, and was dependent on its mother's
milk for food—baby whales drink up to fifty gallons
of milk a day. If Lynne didn't find the mother
whale, the baby would suffer from dehydration and
starve to death.
Something so enormous—the mother whale was fifty
feet long—suddenly seemed very small in the vast
Pacific Ocean. How could Lynne possibly find her?
This is the story—part mystery, part magical
tale—of what happened . . .
I opened this little book (160 small pages) with a certain degree of trepidation because animal stories, whether they be tales of favored pets or encounters in the wild, are a mixed bag. My worries didn't last long - Grayson is a pure delight that reads like a fable but is actually true. At the center of the story is Lynne Cox, now a renowned long-distance swimmer, but then just a 17-years-old out for a practice swim early one morning in the waters off Seal Beach in Southern California.
The whale tale forms the center of the story but, for me, it was the bit players that stole the show - the rays wallowing in the warm water under the pier, the sun fish snoozling close to the legs of the oil rig and the green sea turtles "carrying their homes along with them like aquatic RVs"...continued
Full Review
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(Reviewed by BookBrowse Review Team).
Adult Gray Whales weigh 30-40 tons and measure about 45 feet (14 meters); they have dark skin with gray patches and white mottling, the calves are born dark gray to black (sometimes with distinctive white markings). They are baleen whales (with a series of 130-180 fringed overlapping plates hanging from each side of the upper jaw in lieu of teeth), as such they feed by drawing sediment and water into their mouths, expelling the water and sediment through the baleen plates, leaving the trapped food ready to be swallowed.
Courtship and mating behavior are complex, and frequently involve 3 or more whales of mixed sexes (one on top to keep the the other two down), They make one of the longest of all mammalian migrations averaging 10-14,000 ...
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Anne Rice
A story of remarkable simplicity and charm. A young swimmer invites us into sea off the coast of California where through her eyes we see an entire realm of creatures we have never known so intimately before. Truly for people of all ages, Lynne Cox’s adventure with the baby whale, Grayson, becomes a parable and an experience, thanks not only to the author’s great and generous spirit, but through her immense gift for describing nature.
