Executive Traveler January 2004
© Dale Leatherman 2004
There's a world of difference between watching whales from a boat and joining them in their underwater habitat. Spending a week in an isolated whale sanctuary aboard the Turks & Caicos Aggressor II is the animal experience of a lifetime.
By Dale Leatherman
I saw a flash of white, glanced left, and my heart jumped into overdrive. I was on a collision course with a humpback whale – a 40-footer weighing about 80,000 pounds. I had learned that humpbacks are the gentlest creatures in the sea, but did this behemoth realize I was in her path? I swerved and rolled onto my side so I could safely watch her glide by.
But instead of passing me she slowed and rolled onto her side until her large right eye was at my eye level, less than five feet away. We swam that way, eyes locked, for a brief, ethereal moment – a moment that left me stunned. Call me crazy, but in the whale's eye I saw dignity, curiosity, and an ageless wisdom.
The great whale blinked and rolled onto her back, exposing her massive white belly to the water's surface. As her 15-foot white pectoral fins waved in the air, I noticed a ragged section missing from one appendage, probably a shark bite inflicted when she was young. The other flipper was marred by a round hole, possibly an old harpoon mark.
All whales carry scars from encounters with reefs, sharks and the sharp-edged inventions of man, but by these distinctive markings I knew that I had just met Valentine, a North Atlantic humpback whale who returns every two years to winter in the Silver Banks, a 75-square-mile whale sanctuary 90 miles north of the Dominican Republic.
Contact me to read the entire story or to discuss second rights or a rewrite. daleatherman@cs.com