What It's Like To Swim With A Singing Whale

You can hear him long before you can see him. In fact finding him is probably the hardest part. We used to joke, "How do you hide something that big?" In calving areas only the males sing. They sing the same song over and over. It's about 15-20 minutes long and they come up to take a few breaths in between repeats before diving back down to belt out into oblivion. When you're close you can hear them singing, sometimes even while still on board a small boat. The sound waves ricocheting off anything in their way.

I remember we all laid down and put an ear against the floor of the deck. We could hear, him but we couldn't find him, even when we'd slip in the water and have a look around. Underwater his backside appeared the same shade of blue as the water surrounding him, so unless you happened to approach his white-sided belly you could easily swim past him. But suddenly we started to see the outline of his figure, light edges of something different starting to stick out in the here he was, hanging upside down. We slowly floated towards him. The last thing we wanted to do was disturb him or spook him away.

The sound would deafen the largest subwoofer speaker ever made. You can FEEL the sound. Shaking your entire body. My free diving fins are as long as my legs and I could even feel the very tips of them vibrating. Imagine standing beside a huge speaker at a concert. Now multiply it by ten. It's feels almost like your bones are rattling inside you, making the tips of your fingers feel tingly.

After floating at the surface for a while we saw that he was pretty unthreatened by us so I slowly swam down to get a closer look. The closer and closer I got down to his head, the deeper and louder I could hear and feel his singing. I finally reached his face and hovered to properly look over. And I saw his eye, looking me over slowly, as he kept singing. I just closed my eyes and held my arms out and let myself hang there. I can't fully explain it. It just felt like magic.