How to Speak Whale

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Enter, Pursued by a Whale

On September 12, 2015, I was kayaking with my friend Charlotte Kinloch in Monterey Bay, off the coast of California. We’d left the shore around 6 a.m., along with a guide and a half-dozen other kayakers from Moss Landing, a deepwater harbor halfway up the long bay between the coastal cities of Monterey and Santa Cruz. We were split into pairs, and each pair was allotted a two-person kayak. It was cold, misty, and so still I could hear the water dripping from our paddles onto the sea’s surface. Within the calm of the harbor walls, sea otters floated on their backs at rest, eyeing us from a distance, clamped to one another in fluffy rafts. As we turned past the piled boulders of the breakwater into the open ocean, groups of sea lions rolled about on the surface all around us, like the tops of turning cogs in a giant underwater machine, whiskery and snorting. The fog around us diffused the morning light so that it felt like paddling in a lightbox, and often little could be seen, but life was all around us. Above, pelicans cruised to the jagged cries of gulls.

I peered at the gray, almost metallic sea. Beneath us now was an underwater chasm deeper than the Grand Canyon. Although we were within earshot of land, it was already hundreds of fathoms deep, a great crack stretching thirty miles out from the coast far out to the sea. A freak of geology—the third largest underwater valley in the world—it channeled deep, food-rich seawater up to the surface, where the maritime alchemy of sunlight and nutrients fed an astonishing food chain considered a wonder of the natural world. In the 276 miles of shoreline and six thousand square miles of ocean, the National Marine Sanctuary contains such an abundance and diversity of life that it is known as the Blue Serengeti. On land there are just a few places, like its namesake the Serengeti in Tanzania, where you can witness megafauna. On most continents the largest animal you are likely to see is a cow. Yet many giant beasts remain in the seas. Mostly they dwell far from human eyes, in polar waters or clustering around remote island chains. But here, because of the canyon, mingled the largest aquatic creatures on the planet: great white sharks, leatherback turtles, giant ocean sunfish, elephant seals, humpback whales, killer whales, and the vastest of all the megafauna, blue whales. Right next to the shore, alongside one of the biggest sprawls of humankind, just down the road from San Francisco and Silicon Valley.

Our guide, Sean, was a young, bearded, brown-haired bloke who looked like he spent more time with a kayak-skirt hanging from his waist than dressed in land clothes. Sean had explained that if we saw any whales, we should keep a hundred yards away from them. They were wild animals and it was on us to stay out of their way, not the other way around. There were many kinds of cetaceans in these waters. Gray whale mothers escorting their young calves along the coast from their birth waters in Mexico; killer whales lurking to hunt them; fin whales, minke whales, cruising through, chasing plankton swarms; and Risso’s dolphins hunting squid.

As we paddled out of the harbor, only a few minutes passed before we saw the whales. They were everywhere. The morning fog lifted to reveal their spouts shooting up from the surface in all directions; whale breath marked the air along the sandy coast toward Monterey and out to sea. As a conservation biologist and wildlife filmmaker, I have been fortunate to see a lot of whales of many different kinds. But I had never experienced anything like this. There were so many. At first, all those we spotted were distant, half a mile off. Then a group of three popped up a stone’s throw away, one after another, moving quickly. Before long, more appeared and disappeared behind us. Sean told us to stick close together, and we backpedaled to keep our distance. With no wind or waves, the sudden, plosive exhale of a whale surfacing felt scarily loud and close, something between a whinnying horse and a gas canister being depressurized. Their breath, like stale, fishy broccoli, carried downwind toward us.

Often sighting a whale can be anticlimactic: Mostly you see them when they come up to breathe, and from high up on the deck of a boat it can be like fleetingly glimpsing a big exhaling log. It’s often hard to get a sense of their scale. Yet, from the kayak, it was remarkably different. As we watched them along the water level, we felt their size, and their power.

The whales we were seeking that morning were a species called humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae), one of the largest of all the cetaceans—the name given to the group of mammals that includes whales, dolphins, and porpoises. When a humpback whale is born, it already weighs as much as a white rhino. The adults swimming around us were each mostly the size of an airport shuttle bus. The flat wash of the misty light brought out all the detail of their skin, which resembled the texture of a cucumber with a filigree of cracks and scars, the muscular ridges along their double nostrils, clamped shut on the tops of their heads. They were blue-gray on top and paler underneath, with long, armlike pectoral fins.

We’d been told that the whales were feeding on a school of fish that stretched over a mile underwater, and there was clearly a great whale feast happening beneath us. Humpbacks are binge eaters, hunting and swallowing hundreds of fish at a time. They are migratory: In the summers, they move to cooler waters, such as Antarctica, Alaska, and Monterey Bay, where they will spend most of each day eating. They pile on the pounds, feasting month after month. Then, in the winters, they fast, not eating for months. They swim to warmer tropical seas where they woo one another, shed their parasites, and birth their young (called calves). Humpbacks are unusually “surface-active” whales; they often lift parts of their bodies out of the water, or roll around on the surface. When lunging at their prey, they can suddenly shoot most of their heads out of the water, mouths agape. When they dive, they fold gracefully and their tail flukes can extend well clear of the surface. In the tropics, they mainly rest and move little, conserving strength for the long journey back. The peace is sometimes broken by the males (called bulls), who charge around after the females (cows) in “heat runs,” battling and jostling one another in bloody, dangerous competitions. Their annual migrations are the longest of any mammal, spanning entire oceans. By the time they return to their feeding grounds, their fatty blubber is so depleted the outlines of their spines are clearly visible. So humpbacks don’t mess around in Monterey. When it’s feeding time, they gorge.

All around us the humpbacks were moving, and fast. They seemed to be clustered in small groups of three or four and turning often. I’ve learned since that these whales can work in teams, using their bodies and walls of exhaled bubbles to trap balls of fish and push them toward the surface before lunging at them together. In these maneuvers, different whales seem to take on different roles. Unusual for mammals that cooperate, the teams of whales often aren’t related to one another, and they stick together year after year, traveling across thousands of miles in convoy. I watched a group of four whales surface, their bodies aligned, pectoral fins overlappingly close. In unison, they exhaled, inhaled, and immediately disappeared. They seemed like volleyball players fist-bumping between points.

These relationships have been called friendships (though scientists generally refer to them as “stable multiyear associations”). Bobbing in our kayaks, toes numb, mouths agape, we watched them feed. I was later told that at least 120 whales were identified in the bay that day. Sometimes they would slap their fins on the water with a great phat noise (“pec-slapping”), or even raise their heads above the surface to the level where their eyes could look about them in the air, a behavior known as “spy hopping.” Toward the horizon we saw a couple of partial breaches—whales throwing themselves up out of the water and crashing back down in a white explosion with a whump noise, like distant thunder. I didn’t realize at the time that this was, even for Monterey Bay, an unprecedented feeding frenzy. We’d chanced upon the greatest concentration of whales, with the calmest weather, the closest to shore in living memory.

I looked over at Sean, our guide, and noticed that he did not seem relaxed. His eyes flicked back and forth over the four boats in our little flotilla; he regularly called out to us to come back together if we drifted too far apart and to paddle backward as new whales appeared. Of course, whales can move a lot faster than kayaks. As the morning wore on, three or four whale-watching boats and other kayakers joined us. We were so close to the beach that a stand-up paddleboarder had even made it out. I had long since stopped caring about how cold and damp it was, or the fact that all feeling from my bottom was gone. After a couple of hours, Charlotte—who had before that day never seen a whale in her life—and I turned our craft away from the whales, and with the rest of our group, we headed back to shore, hyperattenuated and awed.

We had made it about halfway to the harbor when suddenly about thirty feet in front of us an adult humpback erupted from the sea, shooting impossibly upward—as if a building had grown out of the ocean, as Charlotte would later describe it. When a whale is in the water, it is like an iceberg: You see only a fraction of it and have no true conception of its size. Each foot of humpback whale weighs about a ton, and adults range from about thirty to fifty feet long. An animal three times the weight of a double-decker bus. Can you imagine what that looks like hovering above you? One moment we were on the flat, calm sea going home, the next this gargantuan, living mass of muscle and blood and bone was in the air, arcing toward us. I remember noticing the grooves on its throat. Ventral pleats, I thought to myself. And the next thing I recall is being underwater.

A humpback whale is three times bigger than the biggest T. rex; its sixteen-foot pectoral fin is the largest and most powerful arm in the history of life on Earth. If you were to X-ray a humpback’s pec fin you would see your own arm, writ monstrous: shoulder blades into humerus bone, joining radius and ulna, hand bones and fingers—a legacy of their lives on land before their ancestors returned to the seas. As the whale came down onto us, the force of the impact punched the kayak beneath the water, and we were sucked down with the sinking whale, leaving just an explosion of spray where we’d been a moment before. Underwater, dislodged from the kayak, I spun, a toy person, tumbling in the freezing water faster than I thought possible, my stomach yawing with the feeling you get when you jump off something high. My eyes were open but I could see nothing but whiteness. I sensed that the whale was still very close. And then I felt it move away without touching me. The white of the explosion turned to dark seawater. It was only at that point that I felt fear. Until then, it had been a matter of facts: There was a whale above my head and I was going to die. Some reptile part of my brain now rationalized that the only reason I wasn’t yet dead must be that I was in shock and couldn’t feel that my body was broken into pieces. Soon, I’d surely be hit by the pain and lose consciousness. But miraculously I felt my lifejacket tug upward, and I kicked with it toward the light.

I was certain that Charlotte was dead. As I broke the surface and looked around, I saw her head. Her living head, attached to the rest of her body, eyes wide open and mouth pulled tight in a grin of adrenaline and fear. I felt sheer delight. We were alive.

How the fuck were we alive?

We swam over to our kayak, which was filled with water and lolling on the surface, and clung to it. Its nose was dented and deformed from the impact, and there were scratch marks from where the barnacles living on the whale’s skin had scraped it. Later, I wondered how much force it must take to dent the rigid molded plastic of a kayak floating on water. If I punched a rubber duck floating in a bath as hard as I could, it wouldn’t leave a mark. Scientists have estimated the forces involved. To breach, a humpback must reach speeds of up to twenty-six feet per second, an astounding velocity for a thing the size of a truck moving through water. For a large adult whale to breach like this, they estimated it would take a release of energy equivalent to about forty hand grenades. It felt as though we’d survived a lightning strike.

Other kayakers paddled over, seemingly more upset than us—which is understandable considering they’d thought they’d just watched us die. As someone fished Charlotte’s flip-flops from the water, a whale-watching boat chugged up alongside us. We looked up at ranks of tourists leaning over. Some shouted to ask if we were OK, while others recorded us on their phones. Most had been looking the other way, out to sea. They assumed we’d been knocked out of the kayak by the splash, not that a whale had actually hit us. We dangled off someone else’s kayak in a state of euphoria and shock, while someone turned ours over to empty it. We were safe. Just then, a whale began moving toward us along the surface of the water. “He’s back for more!” joked a nearby kayaker.

I laughed, but I was unnerved. While I knew that these whales don’t eat people and in fact cannot, having no teeth and a throat the width of a grapefruit, I was also aware that they don’t often breach on people, either. Just as the approaching whale’s head felt like it would hit us, it tilted its front end down and dove. As humpbacks bend into the dive their backs arch distinctively, showing prominently the bulge ahead of their dorsal fin that gives them their name. As the long spine curved and the whale’s head plunged toward the seabed, other parts of it were still moving upward. Like carriages on a train, sections of the whale first rose, then disappeared beneath us: the dorsal fin, then the thick, stocky caudal peduncle—like the tail of a diplodocus, which narrows to a human torso’s width—before the great tail fluke finally emerged, glistening, into the air, trails of water dripping off the tips of each half of the massive paddle.

Floating in the water, I was transfixed by the sight so close in front of us, beloved of whale watchers. The huge, black, heart-shaped flukes shone in the gray light, the tail’s end alone the size of a horse. This is called fluking, I thought. It’s doing that so the weight of its tail helps it overcome its buoyancy, allowing it to sink. Where it dove, it left a mark like a big pancake on the water. A whale footprint. If I had stretched my feet out beneath me, I think I could have touched its body as it passed under. Instead, I wrapped my feeble, stubby land legs around the kayak I clung to like a sloth. I then remembered that a whale had just jumped on us, and we had survived. I turned and said this to Charlotte. In more colorful language, she said she was aware of this but needed me to just shut up until we got back to land.