By Brooke Bessesen
As our boat bumped across ever-changing ripples that stretched as an aqueous desert between West Maui, Lanai and Molokai, I stabilized myself on the forward deck, leaning heavily against the windshield, and scanned the horizon as I do when piloting an airplane, looking for dark specks in a seemingly endless field of blue.
It wasn’t long before we spotted our first blow, a mist of crystalline droplets tossed skyward when a whale arrives at the surface and exhales massive lungfuls of held breath. Each species has a unique blow, a signature of sorts. A right whale’s is V-shaped, a sperm whale’s leans forward and to the left, and the strait narrow geyser of a blue whale can gain thirty feet of altitude and linger in the air.
A humpback whale creates a puffy, oblong cloud reminiscent of an umbrella dripping with dew. It usually surfaces several times in a row, taking easy breaths before lifting its head slightly higher to capture one last enormous inhale, and then diving down for several minutes. It is at this anticipated moment between the final draught of oxygen and the round “footprint” of smooth water left behind that the whale makes its namesake arch of the back, lifting its dorsal fin high in the air and sometimes presenting the full breadth of its tail fluke above the water; a glorious vision that has inspired sea-farers and artists throughout millennia.
Mark swept us to the left and moments later we were motoring behind an MCE group, short-hand for Mother-Calf-Escort, meaning a female humpback, her recently born calf and a male who currently holds breeding rights. From the bow, Jim recorded every minute of their behavior on video.
The threesome was traveling smooth and steady in a northerly direction. Their backs glistened like wet charcoal and when the adults and youngster rose in unison, the sight was particularly skookum, broad and bantam backs side-by-side.
Mark tried to stay upwind of their blows and called “snot alert” every time the dewy mist threatened to sneak across the bow, at which point all cameras were sent into momentary hiding. With time, sea water can be corrosive as battery acid and aside from causing marring artifacts on the lens, it can settle into the camera’s housing and begin a quiet campaign of destruction.
After getting enough surface footage and photos to identify the adults and logging the standard litany of details—time, date, number of whales in the group, direction of travel, observed behaviors, etc.—Mark tempered the throttle and made a grand U-turn, leaving the trio to their morning stroll.
Propelled by scientific interest and rewarded with morsels of understanding, the hours whizzed by as we documented humpbacks that dwarfed our 26-foot catamaran. When one escort made a terpsichorean breach—forty tons of baleen whale flung into full view and reclaimed by the ocean in a whirling mega-splash—we carefully netted brownish skin samples that lingered at the surface and processed them into salt-filled vials for DNA testing.
Mark, Randy and Kevin had been taking turns collecting underwater video and photographs while Jim and I shot images topside but as we spied a new cluster of blows and cut toward it, Mark barked, “Jim, Brooke, get ready to go in.”
The boat bounced and shimmied as Jim and I struggled to keep balance while quickly donning masks and fins. Then we prudently scrambled onto the narrow back platform where we positioned ourselves, sitting elbow to elbow, legs straight out, flippered feet held over the rushing sea wash. Everything happened so fast, the moment of my consummation arrived with no time for reverent contemplation.
“Go. Now,” Mark hollered, and we slipped into the sea.
Part 3 continues in the next issue of Take 5.