Tonga: Whale Swimmin’

One of the many nice things about planning this trip (other than the decision to hold Bikini Meetings) was the happy discovery that we’re all dive certified, and that Tonga, has, like, coral reefs. Our mission was clear.

We did four dives over two days and some snorkeling as well. The last time I tried to dive was over Christmas in the Coromandel and that was a pretty expensive unmitigated failure, to say the least. I was wondering if I’d be able to descend at all or if my ears would explode or what.

Photo by Angela Schlabitz

I did, though, and they didn’t. Even though the neck of my rented wetsuit (ONE DAY I will kit myself completely out, I will I will I will) choked me something fierce and even though I had a little trouble equalizing and a little trouble with buoyancy, all the dives went really well, like maybe possibly even better than any dive since I got certified in Australia. We saw lots of bright pretty colored fish and a shark (a shark!) and heaps of these very funny chubby starfish I wish I’d been able to take a picture of because they were sort of ridiculously adorable, and kina and big huge gigantic sea cucumbers and a pipefish and hanging coral garden and an emperor shrimp and lots of gorgonians and of course some clownfish in anemones and a lovely nudibranch—always a favourite—and I think I even saw a cleaner wrasse giving some big pop-eyed fish a quick tidy-up. I particularly enjoyed hovering for a minute over some dense stag coral and seeing all these itty wee fish just cruising around under there, like an entirely different level of reef.

Photo by Angela Schlabitz

It wasn’t rock star diving, by any means, like even though we saw a shark it was a pretty small one and it ran away as soon as it saw us (or at least by the time I noticed it), and there weren’t any manta rays or anything like that. It was just easy and peaceful and good. A couple times, for a few minutes–when I wasn’t thinking Don’t Hold Your Breath Don’t Kick Too Hard And Disturb The Gorgonians Don’t Touch Anything Accidentally Don’t Forget To Let Some More Air Out Of Your BCD Don’t Choke On The Ridiculously High Neck Of This Wetsuit Don’t Lose Your Buddy Don’t Run Out Of Air—I got that loose calm flowy dive feeling I also had a once or twice on the Great Barrier Reef that’s impossible to describe without sounding like a complete loon, but has to do with looking up at the water above and watching the fish fly around you and thinking about this other world that’s sort of all around us but completely separate to us. Most of the time I was worried about the gear and the technology, but those few moments, when I could get neutral buoyancy or hover right over the reef without kicking and bouncing, without doing anything but breathing and watching…yeah, like I said. There’s no way to talk about it.

The really big thing though, was the whale watching, and the whale swimming. Yeah. Tonga is one of the only places in the world you can legally get into the water with humpback whales, and our trip was juuuust squeezing into the end of the calving season, so of course we were going to do that if we could. We piled on the same dive boat—upon which, by the way, I spent a lot of time being gloriously seasick—but it was a completely different feel. You go for a dive, and, if you’re like me, you’re not fussy. I mean it’s a coral reef, you’re going to see something cool, you’re going to actually do the thing you set out to do. You see a fish, you see an enchinoderm, you throw up over the side of the boat, you’re sorted.

With whales, unsurprisingly, it’s not that simple. For one, you have to, like, find them. I mean, they are big, but so is the Pacific Ocean. First you have to physically find them, like, with the boat, and you don’t know what kind of mood they’re going to be in, and if they’ll let you approach, and if you’ll even be able to see them if the water’s too murky, and maybe they’ll just swim away anyway, and so on and so forth. No guarantees, with whales.

We were lucky, though. While I burped up my seasickness for what felt like hours (much to the delight of my boatmates, I’m sure) our guides did their thing and found two mamas and two babies pretty quickly. We weren’t able to get very good pictures of the babies breaching or the moms waving their pectoral fins around, so you will just have to take my word for it when I say it was amazing to see them. We didn’t get very close in the boat while we were watching—because the whale watching people are very respectful and aware of how the whales are doing, if that even makes sense, and they can sort of tell if they’re bothered by having voyeurs around or not. These seemed fine with us, with one of the babies jumping and breaching like four million times. It was such a kid thing to do, too, like a little kid jumping off a couch over and over “MOM! Watch me!” “MOM! Watch me!” “MOM! MOM! MOOOOOOOM!”

And then it was time to get in. To get in the water—into the open sea–with, like REALLY GIGANTIC ANIMALS who don’t want to eat you (because they don’t eat at all until they get back to the cold water) but who could basically cut you in half by mistake with one of their fins if you got too close, or drown you with a hard push of their flukes. I had serious second thoughts, as we were were getting our masks and snorkels on, but how many times do you get to swim with whales, I ask you? So I got in with everyone else.

Photo by Angela Schlabitz

We had to wait till the whale is sort of in swimming distance and then just jump over the side of the boat, but have quietly and without too much splashing and then swim swim swim with all our might, trying to quell our rising newfound panic (or maybe that was just me!) about being in such deep water with visibility of, oh, like half a meter. And weirdly, even if the whale was pretty close (although we weren’t allowed to approach closer than fifteen meters) it’s still sort of hard to see—at least it was when I was in the water with them. I wasn’t in the water when the above picture was taken but Rachel said that when the whale was just hanging out there in front of them “it was just….all whale.”

(The above wasn’t taken when we were in the water but is by the fabuous Fins N Flukes, with whom we did all our diving and whale swimming. Our visibility wasn’t as clear and we didn’t get as close–but still, cool!)

I was in the group that got to see a mom and a baby rise up from underneath. We knew they’d dived, and we weren’t sure when they were going to come up, and at one point I got very concerned that they didn’t know we were in the water and that they’d come up underneath us, unwittingly. And we just sort of—stayed there, looking around nervously, when all of a sudden we saw these white patches on the baby’s belly, soaring up from the green.

Photo by Angela Schlabitz

It’s hard to see in this picture—it was hard to see underwater, too—but if you look right above Rachel’s ankle you can see the white patches too. How Angela had the presence of mind to take this photo I will never know, because just when I was getting over how very large a baby humpback whale is, up came its mom.

It was scary and intense and I felt a little shaky for a while, in between bouts of seasickness. Not bad shaky, really, just, like: that was a lot. I was a little reluctant to get back in the water for a while–that water is so deep and those whales are so big–but I’m glad I was a tiny bit brave for a couple of minutes and that I got to be as close to them as I was. (I think I am also glad I did not get any closer. You know how that goes, sometimes).

Stay tuned for next time: all the nothing we did, the husband we picked up in Lifuka, and attempting to get home.