It’s a sky-blue afternoon, with combed out clouds and an onshore breeze. From your bench high on grassy bluff, the view is of twin coastlines peeling away from each other as the firth widens toward the North Sea. The bench sits beside a path. When walkers pass many give a civil nod or a ‘fine day’.  A normal Saturday, as normal as it gets now.

You can see islands. Close to shore is Inchkeith, with its concrete WW2 fortifications still visible; far out lies the bird-rich Isle of May, and the Bass Rock, gleaming under its huge population of gannets. They’ve been islands since the Ice Age ended. Out in the firth, several ships are riding at anchor, tankers mostly, rust red and blues, waiting to be loaded with oil.  How calm they seem, almost innocent. Like cigarette ads were, once. 

There’s an app called Marine Traffic.  On it, you can summon up a map of the Firth, with the anchored ships shown as coloured dots. You can discover that the reddish one off Kinghorn is an LPG tanker, sailing under the flag of Malta, having arrived from Portugal. That blue one farther out is the Speciality, an oil/chemical tanker on its way from Rotterdam to Grangemouth.  Yet another is registered to the Marshall Islands, a Pacific nation already drowning as sea levels rise.  There are even a couple of actual drilling rigs close to the Fife shore, one red and white striped, one sherbet yellow. They look like a kid might have made them from Meccano. They’re destined for the breakers’ yard.  The shipping channel is marked by beacons. Ships are piloted in and out of the firth, to where it becomes open sea, out as far as the Bass Rock and Fife Ness, as far as you can see from this bench. Oddly enough, the pilot cutters are named after big cats. 

But you’re not here for ships. You’re here because of the humpback whales. Two of them have been seen frequently, for a few weeks now. They’ve had their photographs in the paper and films on YouTube. But you have to keep watch and be lucky; unlike ships, whales don’t send up satellite signals every three minutes. If they’re out there, they’re travelling under cover, except when they breathe. They must navigate unassisted, dodging the din and infrastructure, the eroding rigs, the stanchions and propellers, the offshore wind farms, tugs and fishing gear. Perhaps even now one or the other is moving past the Sarnia Liberty, an ‘oil products tanker’ (Hazard A – Major) which is turning slowly as the tide ebbs. Or avoiding the Forth Leopard. You scan the water, the islands, the increasingly unnerving oil-burning, oil-transporting ships. You scan the East Lothian coast with its new housing and wind turbines on the hills beyond. Then it’s back to quartering the sea, looking for a blow, a dark back.

The sun catches the sail of a yacht. A small flock of terns flits along the shoreline, over the heads of some children who are paddling. ‘The miniature gaiety of seasides’ as Philip Larkin said, ‘still going on, all of it, still going on!’

What if the world’s whales also sent their position to satellites, as ships do? We’d know where they were, or most of them. There would be no need to sit on clifftops, keenly watching, as there’s no need now to navigate by sextant. There could be an app: call it Whale Traffic. Maybe the whales would be given heroic names, like ships. Imagine if Ocean Valiant was a blue whale, not a superannuated oil rig. Or if Viking Warrior was a great living creature, rather than a tug manoeuvring a tanker. We’d gain a knowledge of a sort, but lose the reward for patience, and the chance encounter, the astonished what was that? No more flukes, so to speak.  It might happen though: ancient mariners surely never imagined that ships would be tracked like they are now. In the olden days, once you sailed out of the firth and dropped the pilot you were gone, and perhaps the happier for it. At last, the open sea and the stars!

There is no open sea. The world is not infinite. We’ve learned that much.

The app idea is not so fanciful. Recently Norwegian biologist (and famous wildlife photographer) Audun Rikardsen and his team from Tromsø University, have indeed been fixing satellite tags to whales and to orca, to follow their vast movements. Over several recent years they’ve tagged a number of humpbacks off Svalbard and in the fjords of northern Norway, as the animals feed during the herring season. The project’s website shows a jagged fizz of coloured lines in the Barents Sea which in time becomes half a dozen ribbons unfurling gently across the Atlantic. Each coloured ribbon shows a particular whale migrating south-west to the balmy waters of the Caribbean, their breeding place, a three-month journey.  Sometimes they amble. No. 47570, for example, took a long whale-road round the north of Iceland. For a while, No.166149 sported off the Butt of Lewis. The researchers say that one individual reached the waters off Guadeloupe, but remained there for only two hours before heading north again. What? It didn’t care for its beakerful of the warm south?  They may be tracked, but they still move in mysterious ways. In time the satellite tags fall off and mid-ocean, the coloured ribbons end.

Perhaps it’s just your age and stage, a woman of 60 sat on a park bench, the centre of no-one’s attention, but you find yourself thinking about the moment when the satellite tag falls off.  Can a whale feel the tag it carries? And sense it when it goes? Is it sudden, as when the strap of your bag snaps? Or is there a gradual loosening, as with a milk tooth?  And when it goes, what happens? A reduction in significance, a turning away of surveillance, a tiny welcome relief? The coloured ribbons end and the creatures swim on into their lives, as best they can. 

No whales today. Down at the shore there’s even a few folk bathing. You could watch them through your binoculars if you really wanted, but that would be unseemly.  Instead, you return the greeting of a dog-walker as he passes by, then concentrate on the sea. The oil ships turn like slow dials on the tide.