I used to dive a lot and my dive club had a lot of keen photographers and there was a kind of bond with a separate club of photographers. The photographic group went on exotic holidays the dive club tended to be more cheap and cheerful. Anyway one year the photographic group decided they were going to go to French Polynesia for a one week holiday in Rangiroa diving with sharks and then a second week somewhere else (can't remember what the island was called) snorkelling with whales. I signed up for it.
Ignoring the first week (which was pretty darned good), the second was a fabulous jaw dropping experience. We were taken out on a quite highsided boat difficult to get into from the sea. The first day was mixed, the skipper could not find them. We jumped in anyway and could hear their calls which I possibly unPC like decided to mimic. Was rewarded late in the day when I saw (faintly) a humpback swim underneath me. Managed to get it on video camera, was the only swimmer who got a shot. Day 2 was an epiphany. Sea state was fairly rough, bright sunlight, so bright I could not see my video screen and thought that it had packed up or was out of power. Left it on the boat when we found some humpbacks. Jumping in to water with 80m+ visibility was immediately close to a pair of large humpbacks (perhaps a courting couple). It was soon obvious that they were as interested in us (of which there were about 20) as we were in them. One of them kept rolling over onto his back to show us his white belly while staying at about 30m depth , at a guess a male showoff
, no sense of fear from us or from them, if they had wanted to lose us it would have been simple to do so, they can swim fast and dive deep. At one point one of them surfaced and didn't move and was soon surrounded by the other 19 snorkellers. I didn't fancy that, thought that surrounding him/her was a bad idea and so tacked off to try and see if I could get a more distant frontal view. Was very relieved to see the humpback obviously very aware of the surrounding swimmers just gently exhale and sink to depth before moving off a little. That's intelligence and empathy in one I thought. And of course my video camera was working perfectly just not obviously so in bright sunlight.
Day 3 was much the same though this time I took the video camera
Saw some breaching at which point the guide decided we should vacate the area. At the end of the day most of the photographers were out of film bar one on digital and me on video, and we were tired and were almost about to go when the skipper said there was one underneath us at about 20m distance. Adrenaline kicked in and we both jumped in. Once orientated and had found the whale, it decided to do a swim by (it was curious too). It came within touching distance, eyeballing me all the way until it left me in it's wake, never to be seen again.
Day 4 was the end of the snorkelling, torrential rain washed mud into the sea so that from 80+m vis the water looked the colour of the Thames estuary.
You can learn a lot about whales by swimming with them, they are sociable, intelligent, fearless, curious, and surprisingly unwilling to harm. Not sure I would want to try that with Orcas though!
