WhaleSound is a research outfit that takes passengers, not a tour company that mentions science. The biologists Jorge Gibbons and Juan Capella have been working the western Strait of Magellan for three decades, and the humpback population of the Francisco Coloane marine park is largely known because of them. Carlos Valladares runs the business side.
The trip is three days and two nights out of Punta Arenas, sleeping in domes at their Ecocamp on Isla Carlos III — a hundred-odd kilometres west of the city, reachable only by sea, with no road and no village. You go out in small boats among humpbacks and sei whales, sea lions, dolphins and the Santa Inés glacier, and you come back knowing considerably more than you did. For those with a week there is a seven-day run through the Strait and into Tierra del Fuego, eight to twelve passengers; for those with a morning, six hours around Cabo San Isidro.
They publish one mobile number and it is also their WhatsApp.