Mighty Humpback Whales

As sailors it’s normal to be sat around a bamboo table, flip-flops left at the door, sharing our adventures with complete strangers. The beachfront bar grapevine is an abundant source of local information; usually fascinating, sometimes hilarious and too often dodgy. Among my catalogue of collected useless information is the top 5 do-not-go-to-unless-you-wanna-die launderettes in Australia. I can also bet that the world’s smallest restaurant chairs are the kiddy-sized, brightly-coloured plastic sets in the streets of Vietnam. I am 6 feet tall.

More than once I have been caught arguing that the best beaches in the world are in the tin-pot little town in remote Western Australia in which we spent a glorious twelve years. Less than an hour’s drive from this town, which is two days’ driving from the capital city, is the pristine Ningaloo Reef. It's the middle of nowhere. Along a remote 260km stretch of coastline you simply pull up where you don’t see another human and have the place to yourself. The summers are hot, and winters are nonexistent. The waters, beaches, gorges and desert are virtually untouched, free of plastic and evidence of human life, while being absolutely stuffed with healthy wildlife. It is a home of the whale shark and a resting place for humpback whale mothers and calves for many months of the year. Our young boys thought that every kid grows up sailing and swimming with these creatures, as that was their weekends between July to November. On days when the Exmouth Gulf was a millpond, we’d kill the engine, sit in the silence and the biting sun, no boats or land in sight, just a wriggly, fuzzy line on the horizon. Before long there’d be a thunderous ‘whack’ of a whale slapping the water, sometimes a few kilometres away but sounding as if it were alongside. In light breezes we could use a little sail to glide through the playground that we shared with these gentle monsters. They seemed to know we posed no threat; no propeller to hurt them nor deafening engine noise. They often swam along beside our sailing boat, eyeballing us as we tried to take in every smooth line, barnacle, scar while trying to remain quiet. The kids will tell you about the one who made curious eye contact with them up at the bow while its tail stretched to the stern, some 49 feet back. They recall how it dived below us, coming up on the other side of the boat, meeting our gaze once more. That’s 25 to 30 tonnes of moving animal, the size of a brachiosaurus, or more than 1.5 London buses, or the length of a semi-trailer, playing under and around the boat, causing us no harm.

It wasn’t all beauty and grace, though. Our kids will never forget how they learned the diet of a humpback, as it burped a few metres away. When its outgoing breath wafted across the deck, we were taken back to the last seafood market we’d visited in Indonesia, in the late afternoon, where the stragglers should have packed up before the heat of the day did its magic. Jonah would have been more traumatized by the stench than the claustrophobia.

Happy humpbacks cavort, snort and generally show off. Mums discipline their errant babies who stray too far from them or too close to our boat, by slapping a fin or giving them a strong nudge. Our boys had not long before been toddlers, so I felt her pain: one minute they’re adorable, the next diabolical. It’s a full-time job.

During afternoons of family bliss like this we felt complete. Our boys were learning to love and understand the world around them, and surely it would provide them with the will and ability to protect it when the time came. We looked forward to introducing them to one creature and one landscape at a time, as we sailed the world.