La Ballena Cantando (The Singing Whale)

Monday of mine and Ted’s road trip brought me a top-ten experience…not for this year, this place, or even this decade. For life.

We set out at eight in the morning from Uvita, CR, near Marino Ballena National Park for a trip to go snorkeling, dolphin watching and, if all went well, whale watching too. Marino Ballena is an almost-all-water national park, beginning 50 meters on shore and heading out for hectares and hectares into the open sea, protecting the many animals that call it home, including the migratory Humpback whale.

Humpback whales, up to sixty feet long and forty plus tons (80,000 lbs) migrate from Alaskan waters down to Costa Rica and back for mating (Costa Rica) and birthing (Alaska). As we boarded our twenty-two foot skiff along with ten other tourists, our captain Quiquo reminded us that there was no guarantee we would see a whale. That was up to Mother Nature.

We headed straight out to the Whale’s Tail, a great geographic formation that bedevils anyone trying to label God’s creation. At low-tide, the Whale’s Tale is a peninsula beginning as a narrow sandbar extending from the beach and ending in a perfectly formed whale’s fluke of rock. At high tide, all but the tallest rocks completely disappear and the Whale’s Tail is gone, simply another part of the ocean floor. Ted and I and a new friend Tim had actually snorkeled the Whale’s Tail the day before—but that is another story.

At high tide, the sand bar and rocks that make up the Whale's Tail at Marino Ballena National Park are complete underwater and the whale vanishes.

After just a couple minutes of snorkeling, Quiquo received a call on his cell phone. “Dolphins down the beach!” Snorkelers climbed back in the boat and we zoomed southward looking for Flipper and friends. We were in for a real treat as we discovered a dozen or so bottle-nosed dolphins swimming and playing just a few hundred meters offshore. They swam close to the boat, just under the water and it was easy to see their grey-blue bodies in the clear turquoise water. I attempted some underwater photos and videos of the dolphins, reaching my waterproof camera over the edge of the boat. Unfortunately, none captured the dolphins. Ted captured this nice photo.

Two of the bottle-nosed dolphins that swam and played near our boat.

Though no dolphins breached, they did come up for air and we enjoyed watching them for nearly an hour until Quiquo’s cell phone rang again. “Ballena!” There was a whale 12 kilometers off shore. We zoomed off in search of him, excitement filling the boat. Twenty minutes or so later, we arrived to an inconspicuous piece of sea, marked only by the presence of two other small boats, one of which was Quiquo’s friend who had reported the whale. We learned from him that the whale had breached (jumped up out of the water) about 10 times prior to our arrival.

We all stood, cameras posed at the ready, murmuring to each other, looking all around, waiting, hoping that the whale would come up.

And then he did. About 50 meters away, his back surfaced and I was reminded of Leonard Nimoy’s show In Search Of, and specifically the episode on the Loch Ness monster, in which Nimoy presented grainy photos of the underwater legend surfacing. Like Nimoy’s Loch Ness Monster, our whale’s back was black and bumpy, narrower than I had imagined, almost like of the back of a gigantic serpent. It curled above the water and then descended back down as his beautiful fluke came up and out of the water for a picture-perfect moment.

Ted captured the real whale's tail in this photo. Quiquo estimated the whale at 18 metres (55 feet) and 80,000 lbs.

The whale surfaced in this way several times and we were all delighted. Then, Quiquo asked us all to be quiet. “The whale is singing. Listen," he urged us. We all hushed quickly and, sure enough, we heard the faintest song emerging from the water. It was very beautiful.

And, then Quiquo said to me: “Jerry, is there sound on that video camera of yours?” I replied that there was.

“Jump in then. Dive down a few meters and catch the whale’s song on video. We can hear it a bit now, but when you go down there, it will vibrate through your whole body.”

“Really? Can I go in?”

“Sure. No mask. Just go in like you are.” (Swimming with whales and dolphins in Costa Rica is strictly illegal; I guess his no mask rule was intended to make it look like I just fell in, if somebody came by.)

And, so, a little nervous and being watched by all my comrades on the boat, I plunged into the blue Pacific Waters—the only human for miles around in the water.

I plunged a few meters below the surface and opened my eyes. The salt stung but the vision was of deepest blue. Just as each layer of an onion is only faintest white, nearly see through, but the whole onion is white—here too, each bit of water was the slightest blue, nearly transparent, but the whole impression was of deepest, never ending blue. Extraordinary.

And, then his song rose up through the water to me. Like Quiquo had said, it reverberated through my whole body. I could not see him, but he was there, singing. And I was the only human to hear him in those moments. I was bathed in this impossibly blue water, but even more so, I was bathed in his song.

When I was fifteen, I was in the Badlands, South Dakota and a friend, Jim, and I were hiking in a particular canyon, near sunset. For no particular reason, I ended up in front of him, just as we were about to summit the western wall of this three walled canyon. I reached the top, Jim a few feet below me, and looked over the edge. The sun at that very moment was a firey ball descending below the horizon, silhouetting a deer jumping at that very moment past a wiry, leafless tree also perfectly silhouetted. The stark, South Dakota landscape was lit in perfect orange. And I was the only one to see that moment. The image and the feeling of that moment is forever stitched in my heart and soul. A perfect moment to which I was the sole witness. Jim summited a minute later but already the deer had moved on, the sun had sunk and changed the light.

And, so it was with this whale song. I surfaced after twenty seconds or so, told my boat-mates how stunning it was and then dived back under to be alone with him again. His song again rose up to me. I don’t know where he was and I never did see him under there. He might have been right under me, or 100 meters away. His music didn’t seem to care about distances. It shot right through me as I floated effortlessly in the water, like a baby in his mother’s womb. I came up again uncertain if the salty water on my face was from the sea or from tears flowing from the transcendent beauty of the moment.

I climbed back in the boat and played the video for my boat mates. All listened in silence. Just as I was feeling how fortunate I was to have experienced the moment and how sad it was that my boat mates would not, Quiquo said “OK. Everybody—in the water!” All those with bathing suits on jumped in and none were less touched than I had been.

It is a memory that I will carry forever.

Here is a video of his song (posted on YouTube), as I recorded it (not the bit of Neil Young at the front end however :-))...as always it pales in comparison to the moment of being there.