Chicken Soup for the Ocean Lover's Soul (6 page)

He’s playing with me. He doesn’t want to hurt me,
I said to myself reassuringly. I took a stroke toward the beach, but my intention was rudely dismissed. How had he passed within inches of my face without touching my outstretched arms? With an inverted underwater butterfly scoop, I retreated. He passed, and I withdrew farther. Why hadn’t I sighted the distance to the beach? There, I knew, sunbathers were rubbing their bodies with lotions and oils, and the voices of splashing children reached my ears. I shuddered from the cold. Were we in deeper waters? How far out had the current drawn me? He might not ever let me back to shore! All my life I had been more comfortable in the water than out, but now I realized that I could never be more than an adopted child of the sea and that I wanted land, home.

So closely did he glide past me that I blinked, so slowly that I followed his flawless design—his tail, which could crush me if it flexed near my head and could puncture my eardrums. I recalled a high-school teammate emerging from the pool with blood dripping from his ear, a casualty of a mere swimmer’s butterfly kick. I was a swimmer, I reminded myself. Swim.

I stroked twice, full determined strokes. The water became murky, as if full of sand. I lowered my feet and felt the bottom. Splashing my way out of the waist-deep water, I shouted “Whale! Whale!” to the fishermen strung along the curved beach. “There’s a whale in there!” But the curious state of relaxed concentration of the fishermen, their silent dialogue with the sea, prevailed. Then two hundred yards from the shore, a gray-white rolling hump broke the water’s surface, submerged and broke through once again. The fishermen, as if their lines had been snared and dragged to that spot, turned their bodies, pointed their poles and stared. This was one “fish” that no one would catch.

Joseph Hallstein

If You Could Touch a Whale

It was early March, and our small, wooden skiff was almost the color of the cloudless Mexican sky as we waded through shallow water and hiked ourselves over the side.

Once again, Laguna San Ignacio was filled with wintering gray whales—the same grays that had once been named “devilfish” by terrified whalers. But instead of hugging the shoreline that day, as superstitious local fishermen had done for more than a century, we boldly headed into their midst, carefully scanning for spouts.

Suddenly, a huge head surfaced within inches of the boat, rising to the level of our faces. A single unnerving eye stared. A mouth, more than seven feet long, curved downward in a perpetual frown as though warning us that we were invading. Eighty thousand pounds of whale were poised motionless next to a tiny panga holding a woman, a single fisherman and a slender twelve-year-old girl named Rhiannon.

For a split second no one breathed. And then Rhiannon and I simultaneously reached out and began caressing the scarred, rubbery face of the huge creature.

Between the clusters of barnacles, its skin was smooth, slick and pleasant to the touch, like a wet surfboard. And surprisingly soft. When we massaged, it gave a bit, like an inner tube.

Yes, we massaged. We stroked. We cooed and crooned. We slid our hands inside the lips of this giant creature and rubbed vigorously. We knelt in the bottom of the boat and laid our cheeks against the cheek of what was once considered a monster, and she didn’t move away. And when this beautiful whale raised her head to face us, head-on, both of us leaned forward and kissed her.

Moments later, in open water, the same whale would splash and churn and turn exuberant side rolls, huge flippers foaming up white water in movements that would certainly have smashed the skiff had she been closer. Then she would return to us for another petting with a delicacy of movement that seemed impossible in an animal so huge.

The contact was exhilarating. So much so that, at one point, our fisherman guide had to grab the back of Rhiannon’s life jacket and hold on to her. So intensely involved had the fearless preteen become in stroking this wonderful whale that she inadvertently began to crawl over the bow of the boat and onto the whale’s head. The whale remained perfectly still until the youngster was fully back in the boat.

It was, as Rhiannon would say over and over, “the best day of my life!”

But how dare I, an admittedly intrepid adult traveler, expose a child to the dangers of contact with wild whales in open water, on a sometimes choppy sea?

Never for a moment did I consider her in danger, for I had been to Laguna San Ignacio before. And I will return again and again and again. You see, there is simply no experience in the world like touching a wild whale—a whale that seems to want to be your friend.

A lot has changed since the mid-1800s, when the grays earned their fearsome reputation by fighting their relentless and methodical slaughter by whalers in this very same lagoon. But the great beasts were never a match for man, and the clear blue waters of today then ran red with the blood of dying mothers and calves. By the 1930s, the whales had been hunted almost to extinction. The handful of remaining grays had no reason to trust man and every reason to fear him.

No one really knows why the grays of Laguna San Ignacio first began approaching humans for contact in the 1970s, but each year the number of “friendlies” has increased. Today, as many as four hundred whales gather here at a time, and awesome is still the only word that adequately describes how one feels in their midst.

Each time I have visited, whales of every size and age surround our boat whenever we take to the water, so many that it’s sometimes hard to know where to look next. Whales spouting, sleeping, mating, breaching. Whales with babies. Whales spyhopping to check out the humans.

One by one, the friendlies come to the boat to be touched and stroked and applauded. Forty-ton females bring their one-ton calves and patiently, by example, teach the extremely shy newborns to come directly to our outstretched hands.

During those long, marvelous, sun-baked days each winter, I have tickled the tummies of some of the largest mammals on Earth. I have gotten so close, hanging over the side of the boat, that I’ve looked straight down blowholes into the dark interiors of whales.

Scientists can’t explain, but the fishermen who live with these whales know. And those of us who come here often also know. It is very simple.

We have changed. And they have forgiven us.

Paula McDonald

Back to Sea . . . the Story of J. J.

Having been fortunate enough to have worked with animals all around the world, I’ve been touched by many, many great wildlife “moments.” But none has been quite as rewarding as the saga of a baby female whale named J. J.

It was January 11, 1997, when a nearly comatose infant gray whale was rescued from a beach near Los Angeles, California. Local marine-mammal specialists combined efforts with Sea World of San Diego, and the big baby was rushed to a holding tank at Sea World. The vets who examined the whale said the prognosis was poor, but at least this way it would have a chance to pull through. Helping it back into the water at the beach would have meant sure death.

The process of moving the whale went without a hitch, and soon the one-and-a-half-ton, fourteen-foot-long whale, nicknamed J. J., was under the watchful eyes of experts twenty-four hours a day. She must have liked her new home because she began responding quickly. She was hungry (the best sign from an ailing animal), and she was drinking six liters of whale milk substitute every three hours!

After three days she had gained eighty pounds and weighed in at 1,750 pounds. Even with hopes high, however, the prospect of treating an infant whale in critical condition was daunting. The staff at Sea World was expert in treating marine mammals, but they had never worked with a gray whale. Yet J. J. was defying the odds. Two weeks after the rescue, she was moved into a massive 1.7 million-gallon pool where her health continued to improve. At one year, she tipped the scales at 17,000 pounds and was twenty-nine feet in length. With her gargantuan appetite, she was consuming over eight hundred pounds of fish a day.

Of course, the media was delighting in this “feel-good,” animal-interest story, and soon visitors wanted to see J. J. in the flesh. People came from everywhere to see her. I could hardly believe she was swimming and cavorting in the water much as she would in the ocean! I had to consider what a special experience this was . . . few people are fortunate enough to watch whales in the wild. I’ve caught glimpses of them breaking the surface only occasionally. But the chance to observe a gray whale firsthand at close quarters was a memory I would always cherish. Even at her young age, her size and grace in the water amazed me!

J. J. was lucky to have met some human friends who cared enough to spend countless hours—and dollars—to save her, but her future would be to live with other gray whales in the wild blue waters. The Sea World biologists and trainers weaned her from the milk formula to a diet of squid and fish, the same food she would encounter in the wild. They even taught her how to scoop fish into her mouth and use her baleen to filter out water and sediment.

In late March 1998, the Sea World staff readied their new friend for release into the ocean, but many questions were still unanswered. Would all the training and conditioning be adequate for her new life at sea? Would she try to meet wild whales, and if so, would she be integrated into a pod?

We could only hope for the best. J. J. had been taught to live in the wild, and now was her time. Early on March 31, she was loaded onto a specially outfitted eighteen-wheel truck and driven along Interstate 5 to the release site. Need I say that this was, indeed, an unusual sight, especially with a police escort! Finally, the truck toting the eight-ton whale approached the pier, and J. J. was loaded onto a ship that headed for deep water. The day was overcast, but as we arrived at the release point, the sun seemed to magically appear.

The enormous nylon sling that held J. J. was lifted from the ship, then lowered into the awaiting ocean—and with a swish of her huge tail, J. J. was gone! She had defied the odds. This was the first time in history that a near-dead baby whale had been nursed to health and released back to sea. I kept thinking that so much could have happened to her along the way, from her not being rescued from the beach in time, to rejecting the milk formula and other care she received, to not accepting training and conditioning.

I’m sure that today she is doing just fine in the waters of the Pacific. Go whale-watching sometime and say hello if you see her!

Jack Hanna

Northern Waters

Original painting by Wyland © 2003.

Keiko the Whale

W
e ourselves feel that what we are doing is just
a drop in the ocean. But the ocean would be less
because of that missing drop.

Mother Teresa

If you have kids, you’ve probably seen the movie
Free
Willy
about a boy who saves a young orca from the clutches of an unscrupulous owner. But in real life Free Willy was far from free. The orca, whose real name was Keiko, was captured in the Atlantic Ocean, near Iceland, and lived in captivity after the filming of the movie in a small cement pool at an amusement park in Mexico City. The conditions of the park were poorly suited to an animal of this size, and Keiko developed a skin disease that resulted in lesions throughout his body.

Here was literally the biggest movie star in the world, sick and languishing. If something wasn’t done quickly, Keiko’s future looked grim. Fortunately, word of Keiko’s situation was spreading rapidly around the world. Many people wanted to help, and so did I.

I had been introduced to Keiko through the Mexican tourism authority at Keiko’s residence at the Reino Aventura Park in Mexico City. The minute I leaned over the holding tank and saw the five-ton animal, I knew I had to do something . . . quick. His flippers and flukes were covered with skin growths, and he was thousands of pounds underweight. It sounds kind of strange, but Keiko and I bonded. As I scratched him I said that I would return and do everything I could to make sure he was returned to his native waters off Iceland.

In exchange for his release, I agreed to paint a giant public mural of Keiko swimming free with his family at the entrance to the park. A few months after the mural was completed, Keiko was moved to a larger, temporary home at the Oregon Coast Aquarium to recuperate and prepare for his return to Iceland. Eventually, he gained weight and learned how to catch live fish. He was ready to be flown back to the cool waters of his northern home. Millions of children who had raised nickels and dimes to save Keiko were now keeping their fingers crossed, hoping that Keiko would soon be reunited with his orca family in the wild.