Whale Song

Howard Hall

©Howard Hall

Sound thundered across the Silver Bank and into the deep Caribbean Sea. Plaintive chords rumbled and trilled as if discharged from a base cello the size of an office building. Percussive notes pounded the reef around me, causing my mask and lungs to vibrate, causing me to break stride. And still, I couldn't see the whale.

Bob Cranston and I had been swimming hard for nearly two hours, drawn to the sound like ancient sailors to the mournful call of sirens. Bob towed a buoy on a thin line so that Avi Klapfer and Tom Conlin could follow us in the Undersea Hunter's skiff. But the sound beckoned and our pace was fast causing the buoy to submerge only minutes after we descended. Our mixed-gas, closed-circuit rebreathers produced no bubbles for them to follow. Avi and Tom lost track of us almost immediately. There was no land in sight and for the last two hours Avi and Tom had no idea where Bob and I were. If Bob and I had known that, we would have been terrified.

A dark spire materialized in the distance. Bob and I approached a coral pinnacle that rose from ninety feet to nearly the surface. The whale song diminished in volume as we neared the pinnacle. That was normal. The sound was being blocked by the coral. We swam directly to the pinnacle then circumnavigated the spire until the sound was booming again. At sixty-five feet along the wall there was a shallow, sand-filled cave. Bob and I swam into the cave to rest for a few minutes on the white sand. There were several large anemones living in the coral at the mouth of the cave. Schools of small fish danced in the blue light above the anemones. I watched the play of light flashing from their tiny silver flanks as whale song flooded into the cave from the deep blue beyond. The fish seemed to take no notice of the cacophony.

The few moments of rest passed quickly. Bob and I pushed off from the coral spire and followed the sound. Twenty-five feet below, the white sand and coral patches of the Silver Bank passed slowly. All the blisters on my left foot had broken long ago and my legs were tiring. But the song was very loud now and became louder with every stroke.

©Howard Hall

Then suddenly there was silence. The whale made a series of chirping sounds that seemed to trail away in the distance. We had come to know that these sounds were made by singing humpbacks as they surfaced to breathe. It was bad news for us. During the time it took the whale to take three or four breaths and descend again to the bottom it could move another hundred yards further away. Bob and I stopped and hung suspended at our traveling depth of sixty-five feet. A few minutes later the song resumed, further away and in a slightly different direction. I checked my compass and then checked with Bob to see if he agreed with the new course. We swam on.

Fifteen minutes later we approached a broad coral ridge. There was a deep canyon running through the reef and the sound seemed to pour out of the canyon like river water over steep rapids. I looked over at Bob and shook my head. The sound was fooling us again. I knew the whale had to be somewhere on the other side of the ridge and that the sound was channeling down through the canyon. When we entered the canyon, with the sound reverberating against the canyon walls, we would loose all sense of direction. But we had little choice.

The canyon was shorter than I expected. When we emerged on the other side the whale song was deafening. We were close, extremely close. But now the sound was so loud that it seemed to come from everywhere. It crashed off the coral reef and thundered down from the sky. Suddenly, thinking the whale must be right over my head, I spun around only to find the liquid sky above empty.

I took my best guess at the direction the sound was coming from and then checked with Bob. His best guess was 90 degrees away from my estimate. Had we come so far only to be completely befuddled by the sound that had led us here? We decided to swim off on divergent courses keeping each other in sight as long as possible. We started moving again.

To my right I saw a dark shape. It looked like a jet airliner falling nose first to the ground and frozen in time just before impact. But what looked like great white wings were actually pectoral fins. A few moments of hysterical waving got Bob's attention. Then I dropped to ninety feet and began creeping through the gorgonian corals toward the whale. The sound was almost painful now. It reflected off the coral and sand, pounding my skull like blows from a rubber mallet. Grains of sand danced off the bottom, whether in response to the roar of whale song or a gentle surge, I couldn't be sure.

I waited until Bob joined me then we slowly crawled across the sand on fingertips, careful not to snag our hoses or gauges on patches of coral. We wore our silent rebreathers like a cloak of invisibility. Minutes later we had approached to within twenty-five feet of the whale. It towered above us, a stone monolith casting down booming chords like thunder claps from dark nimbus clouds. The whale's nose hung ten feet above the coral. Its tail angled up at 45 degrees into the gray sky. It was motionless. Blue damselfish and princess parrotfish nibbled at the coral below the whale, seemingly unaware of the awesome voice and the giant shadow that loomed above. I crawled on finger-tips trying to get a few feet closer, moving from one gorgonian to another, trying to remain invisible. I wanted to look into the whale's eye. I wanted to kneel on the coral right under its powerful jaw. I wanted to get closer.

©Howard Hall

Perhaps the whale couldn't hear Bob and I approach with our high-tech rebreather systems. Perhaps it thought we were a pair of turtles. Perhaps it thought we were pieces of the coral reef that had broken away like icebergs and now drifted slowly across the sand. And perhaps if you throw a pig in the air it will learn to fly before it hits the ground. No, I’m sure that whale knew we were there every minute. Certainly our rebreathers caused less disturbance than open-circuit SCUBA, but I doubt we were fooling anyone. Even if the singer didn't hear us approach, there wasn't anything wrong with its eyesight. Hiding behind a sea fan, I could tell that the whale was aware of me. If I had known what it was thinking, I probably would have felt like an idiot. Twenty-five feet was as close as it would tolerate us. Each of the six times Bob and I approached singing whales during the following days, the story was the same. As we approached within twenty-five feet or so the whales slowly moved off only to resume their song a couple hundred yards away.

After nearly three hours, including twenty minutes of precautionary decompression, Bob and I surfaced. There was nothing to be seen but white caps dancing out to the empty horizon. For a moment I had a very lonely feeling. Then I heard a shout and turned to see Tom and Avi grinning down from the skiff only a few yards away. They had lost sight of our buoy over three hours earlier and had been searching frantically. Then they saw a whale surface and a moment later our yellow buoy popped up beside it. That Avi and Tom had been following and photographing the same whale was enormous coincidence, and for Bob and me the best case of pure dumb luck.