Whales!

So you’re in this boat. It’s a gray Thursday morning, the kind that Douglas Adams predicted would mark the end of the world. You’re speeding away from the questionable seaside town of Puerto López toward some offshore rock called Isla de la Plata, part of Machalilla National Park, where they’ve got frigate birds, blue-footed boobies, and snorkeling. They call this coast the “Poor Man’s Galapagos” and so far it’s lived up to its appellation. The big draw for this excursion is that during the months of August and September, humpback whales are known to call this stretch of water their turf. You’re not guaranteed to see whales, of course. But there’s always a chance. You watch, but to either side of the boat as far as the horizon, the sea is unbroken cloud-gray and blue.

But then…

A flurry of excitement. Someone’s spotted something way off to starboard. You crane your neck. There – off in the distance – a spout of water. Then another! Whales breaching the surface to breathe. The captain and the tour guides confer, but the boat presses on toward the island. The whales are too far away. Nevertheless you fumble to extract your trusty Canon T3 with its telephoto lens out of the safety of its drybag. You check the settings – high shutter speed, continuous shooting mode, focus, ISO – and you get ready, watching the horizon with a much less casual eye.

They’re here.

More excitement. Several passengers yell “Whoah!” in unison. Another whale spout, this one much closer and ahead of the boat. The captain changes course. You’re going after them. You shift into a crouch. For millions of years your forebears have been hunters. That instinct quickens your pulse, sharpens your senses. Your weapon is a camera, not a harpoon, but the lizard brain at the base of your skull doesn’t know the difference. The chase is on.

You hear the splash before you see it – like someone dropped a bus into the water. You swivel your lens forward and zoom in toward the spreading bruise of sea foam flattening the waves in a wide oval. You wait. You wait.

Then you watch a hill of black flesh crest a wave and blow a spout of water toward the sky. It sinks back under the ocean and a giant tail follows, black on top and white below. It slaps the sea as it plunges, sending up a wall of spray. Your camera has been clicking three shots per second. You ease up on the trigger and let yourself breathe. Come back, Mr. Whale. I’m not done with you yet.

The captain idles the engines. All the passengers hush. Then another cry and a giant splash forward. You turn to catch it but it’s gone. A whale had jumped out of the water and you missed it. Its tail rises up from the sea and splashes as it sinks, as if it’s laughing. At least you got a picture of that.

Another whale breaches and blows. You swivel for the shot. You’re getting the hang of it, but you’re still slow on the trigger. You quickly figure out that your camera loses focus when the horizon vanishes on the upswell of a wave, so you learn to wait until the boat is sliding down the other side to keep your focus true. You watch for signs that a whale is about to appear: the spout, a slight fuzziness on the water’s surface that hints something big is just below. You shoot several more whale humps and plenty of tails, but the handful of times that a whale leaps full out of the water you’re just too slow to catch it.

One whale sticks his tail straight up in the air and slaps the surface repeatedly. The captain guns the motors and steers the ship around the pod for different viewing angles. You set your camera down in  your lap and simply enjoy the experience. There are whales all around you, creatures that make elephants seem small, graceful beings that dwarf the tiny hull you hope protects you while giants casually swim by.

Fee. Fi. Fo. Fum.

The breachings become fewer and farther between. The pod is moving away save for one, maybe out of idle curiosity about the strange hairless monkeys in their silly little raft. The captain sets course for the island and revs the engine for the next item on the day’s agenda. You look behind for a final glimpse and, jaw dropping, see that the whale is following. Instead of your life flashing before your eyes, all you get is a silly line of dialog from an early episode of South Park: “Oh my god, it’s comin’ right for us!”

You take the shot.

To your relief and secret disappointment, the whale does not Moby Dick your tour boat. You reach the island safely, where you climb a friggin’ mountain to take pictures of boobies and frigates, eat tuna sandwiches while being pestered by hungry sea turtles, then snorkel a reef with big, colorful fish and a fairly strong current.

All in all a good day. You peel off your neoprene wetsuit pants, wring out your soaked t-shirt, wrap your thin, quick-dry African towel around your shoulders, and relax as the captain steers you for home.

But wait. There’s more.

Not fifteen minutes into the ride back, another breach is sighted. This one is close, just off the stern. The captain slows and adjusts our course. A pod of humpbacks is coming alongside. Unlike the ones from this morning, these aren’t feeding or marking territory. These are here to play in the afternoon sun.

Your camera is out and you’re ready this time. And now, the whales are making it easy. You can’t know for sure, but you suspect they’re putting on a show for the cheers and applause every time one of them leaps into the air, flips over, and flops on her back with a splash like God skipping stones. This is what life is about, they seem to say. Why, what did you think it was?

This pod, your group soon figures out, is a family. There is a huge female, a smaller male, and a calf just learning the ropes of what it is to be a young, little leviathan. The mother is a maestro of megaton water displacement, but every now and then her pup leaps from the water in a spiral of sheer delight.

Gone is the primitive hunter in the back of your mind, replaced by pure exhilaration. Speeding along the waves with a trio of vast beings whose lives are so alien to your own, yet who share a common experience of play, of the sun and the waves, of a child running off the end of a diving board and cannonballing into a pool full of adults, it brings such a feeling of unadulterated joy that you want it to last forever.

In the same opening chapters to The Hitchhiker’s Guide in which Douglas Adams ends the world on a Thursday, he also makes the claim that dolphins (and I’ll expand this to all cetaceans) are much more intelligent than human beings because despite their large brains, all they do is muck about in the water having a good time. Damned if the man wasn’t right.