I CAN STILL FEEL THE SENSATION - floating, in warm water. Moving gently up and down with the sway of the ocean. The peace and quiet. Hearing nothing but the sound of my breath echoing in my snorkel. The depth of the blue water - depth in both color and measure.
The mother was suspended at depth - maybe 30 meters below me. Her calf was moving between the surface and her - around every 2 or 3 minutes it would rise up to the surface, take a deep breath, bob around a little, then swim back down to its Mum. After about 20 minutes, she came up to breathe too. She slowly emerged from the depth, becoming bigger as she came closer to where I was quietly floating. She hit the surface and her breath exploded. The only thing I can liken the sound to is the opening of the entire top of a giant air-tight container that has been pressurized. It’s a loud, whoosh, spray of water that showers you like rain…if you’re close enough that is. And I was.
She was about 20 ft from me. And she was staring straight at me. Her eye was unusually small compared to the rest of her. About the size of a cow’s eye, sitting around 2 meters behind her snout, and about 14 meters in front of her tail. But it penetrated the depth of my soul. It was a knowing stare that made me feel like a child. It stirred an intense feeling of admiration. Of wonder. I couldn’t help but think how much more she had seen, than I. To a less intelligent being, I would’ve been nothing but some other creature bobbing about in the water with a funny-looking thing on my face. But, she seemed to know more.
She hung out for what felt like an eternity. In reality, it was about 2 minutes. Then she ducked her head and gently sunk back to her comfort spot 30 meters below. I kept watching the two of them, for about another hour.
Humpback whales are thought of by many as the most charismatic of sea animals. They slap their tails, slap their pectoral fins, breach (dive out of the water and crash back in), and, sing. I have been lucky enough to spend around 40 days swimming with them, across two separate years, 2006 and 2007. That day - the day I stared into the eye of a, maybe, 45-year-old gentle giant for an eternity - changed my life forever.
I swam with whales in Tonga. At the time there were only two other countries in the world you could swim with whales - Dominica Republic and Tahiti. The first year I was there, I was doing some undergrad research on the whale-swimming industry. the second time I was working as a paid guide, enabling others to have their lives changed like mine was the year prior.
When you experience something like that you immediately want to jump into protecting them. While huge, humpbacks were hunted for centuries, taking them down to around only 10,000 on the entire planet. Think about that for a second. Imagine a disease that wiped out all but 10,000 humans. It was marine mammal genocide. Today, thanks to solid conservation efforts globally, estimates have the population at around 84,000….and increasing. This turnaround has them classified as ‘Least Concern’ by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). That’s good news, as long as we can remember what we did to them historically, and don’t enact a repeat. To this day, Norway, Japan, and Iceland campaign to have the moratorium on commercial whaling lifted. It beggars belief.
There are essentially two major populations of humpbacks - one for each hemisphere. Within each, there are a number of sub-populations that frequent different parts of their hemisphere. Each is in a different stage of recovery as shown below.
The northern (typically with a darker belly) and southern (a whiter belly) don’t mix because their migratory cycles have them moving in opposite directions to each other. In the summer months, they head to the cold waters of the Arctic and Antarctic. In the winter months, they head to warmer waters to breed and give birth - examples are Hawaii and Central America in the north, and Tonga, Tahiti, and Australia in the South. This migration is huge. Around, 5,000 miles, twice a year.
Floating in the water, all this was running through my mind. I was thinking about the 400,000 + miles she had probably swum in her life. The fact that she had maybe had a calf every 2-3 years, so 15 or 20 calves in her life? The number of orca or tiger sharks she may or may not have managed to fend off from eating her calves as she nurtured them from birth, through feeding, and then the journeys south. The amount of food she may have eaten each year. The number of titanic battles she witnessed between aggressive male humpbacks competing to mate with her.
Impressive, to say the least. And today, 16 years later, I still get goosebumps when I look through the old pics.