‘Tag me if you can!’, a school yard taunt remembered from long ago. Yet here we are again playing that game of dare, chase and tag on a scale un-imagined from a landlocked childhood. Who would have thought we would encounter Humpback whales both adept and eager to play our boyhood game. We’d swim away […]
Read Moretonga
Just Check’n You Out
Sometimes I wonder just who was checking out who! No sooner had we arrived here and two large humpback whales appeared about 100m away. As soon as we realised they were heading straight for our boat there was a mad scramble for masks, fins and cameras. They came closer; 50m, 25m, 10m and then the […]
Read MoreDeep Five
The the big male far below me had already started blowing bubbles on his last descent. As his stream of bubbles ascended from below it expanded and divided over and over like some roiling cauldron until the ocean became a sea of bubbles telling of his progress far beneath me. As I watched all five […]
Read MoreLL in the Underworld
‘Don’t go in there’ Liam said as he swam back from the gates. Unspoken, we both perceived the gauntlet drift downward to the ocean floor below. For a while we watched and we waited until during a brief lull in the waves we quietly slipped through. It was so intense in that crazy place, always […]
Read MoreMénage à Trois
We followed these three humpback whales on the surface for a while as they played their own games, indifferent to our attempts to get their attention. On one particular drop the three dived in unison and came to rest around 20m below the surface where for a while they remained in this beautiful group cuddle, […]
Read More