Note: I am often asked what my most exciting experience has been underwater. Following is a story I wrote about fifteen years ago about a day in 1987. It still describes my best day underwater.

Swimming in a Blue Whale's Soup
Howard Hall

Howard films a Blue Whale ©Mark Conlin.

The ocean surface was glassy calm. Rays of sunlight converged on my shadow one hundred and fifty feet below and in it I could just make out the white bellies of blue sharks as they fed on a dense mass of krill. A few feet to my right was another huge red mass of krill. Visibility in that direction was almost zero and occasionally I was surprised as sharks suddenly emerged and bumped into me before turning and disappearing into the swarming crustaceans. I tried to ignore the sharks and resist the temptation to film them. I realized I had an opportunity to film something that had never been photographed before; a once-in-a-lifetime chance. I was waiting for the largest creature in the world; in fact, the largest creature that has ever lived. I was waiting for a creature that may reach over one hundred feet in length and one hundred and fifty tons in weight. I was waiting for a creature for which all superlatives are simply inadequate. I was waiting for a blue whale. A group of four blue whales was moving in my direction to feed on the krill surrounding me. I was swimming in the blue whales' soup.

Surprisingly, I was not in some distant and exotic part of the world. I was just ten miles off the coast of San Diego, California in waters I had dived all of my life. But I had to keep telling myself that over and over again because nothing I was seeing was familiar. I had never seen krill off the Southern California coast, I had never seen or heard of pelagic sharks feeding on krill, I had never seen California water so clear, and I had certainly never seen a blue whale before. The situation was so unusual, so incredible, that I felt somewhat disoriented. The ludicrous phrase, "We're not in Kansas anymore" kept repeating in my mind like a broken record.

It seems unbelievable that an eighty foot long animal can swim up to within fifteen feet of you while you remain entirely unaware of it, but the whale's approach had been silent and I had been looking off into the clear water to my right rather than into the krill patch where visibility was zero. When I turned to make sure I was still at the edge of the krill patch, it was gone. In its place was an enormous pleated balloon nearly thirty feet in diameter. It was so close and so large that it took up my entire field of vision. I was looking at the enormously distended throat of a blue whale. It was so large that the animal could have hidden two or perhaps three full size pick-up trucks inside without making a bulge! The fifty foot diameter krill patch was entirely absent. Moments earlier, my fins had been inside the krill patch. Somehow the whale had located and engulfed the entire patch in one mouthful! Amazingly, the whale had also managed to avoid swallowing the numerous sharks and odd skin diver that had been swimming in the krill only moments before.

The blue whale had approached the krill patch moving at about seven knots. When it encountered the krill, it rolled onto its side and opened its mouth. The open mouth acted like a parachute - filling with unbelievable volumes of water and krill, and slowing the whale to a near standstill. The whale then closed its mouth and rolled back to an upright position, slowly purging the water out through its baleen. The krill were gone. And where moments before visibility had been zero it was now over one hundred and fifty feet, presenting me with an incredible opportunity to film the behavior. I suddenly became aware of the death grip with which I held the camera while trying to steady it as the 16mm film rolled through the mechanism at 50 frames per second. The super-wide angle lens was pointed at the enormous pleated throat and I swam backwards to include more of the animals in the frame. I was immediately aware that the shot I was capturing was nothing short of miraculous.

The entire body of a large whale can only be photographed in the clearest of water conditions. But when a baleen whale is feeding, it feeds on plankton which usually reduces water visibility to near zero. In this case, however, the krill had been in a dense patch surrounded by exceptionally clear water. The only thing more unusual than finding blue whales in these waters was the very rare set of conditions which allowed their feeding behavior to be filmed underwater.

With its throat so enormously distended, the whale looked like a gigantic tadpole. But as it expelled the excess water, the animal was transformed into an amazingly sleek and streamlined shape. As it swam away, it looked more like a huge barracuda than the typical artist’s conception of a blue whale. When the tail of the whale finally disappeared in the dark blue water I looked down at the running light of the movie camera with some trepidation. But fortunately, I had remembered to turn it on.

Two days later, the krill disappeared off the coast of San Diego and with it, the blue sharks, and the blue whales. So much about this short episode remains a mystery. A krill bloom off this coast is very unusual. Yet when it occurred, somehow blue whales became aware of it. At the time it was thought there may be as few as five thousand blue whales left on Earth. They are among the rarest and most endangered species on the planet. Yet perhaps twenty had managed to find their way to San Diego to feed on a krill bloom that lasted only a few weeks. How did they know that the krill would be here?

Within a week, water visibility was back down to a typical forty feet and my friends and I resumed our work of filming small fish and invertebrates. Between dives, looking out across the surface near Los Coronados Islands, it was almost impossible to believe it had ever happened.

In the years that have followed, blue whales routinely returned to California waters and several divers have managed to capture good still images of them. I have tried several times to capture a shot with my Sony Cine Alta high definition camera, but have only succeeded in one ghostly image that lasts a few seconds before disappearing into the stygian gloom.