Heavily wrapped, layer upon layer, eyes peering over the tops of our balaclavas, we bounced effortlessly across the ocean surface. The piercing wind whipped our faces with a thousand lashes and the icy spray of the ocean clawed at us over our vessel’s insufficient defence. As it always seems to, the ocean wanted to claim us, but here it chooses a different tactic. It needn’t drag us under, it need only bring us into contact with it’s life-sucking glacial chill.
The Arctic Circle at dawn. One of our planet’s most inhospitable places. But we were here with a purpose. We were seeking the sea monsters that patrol these menacing seas.
“Ah, Hello!” The almost comedic voice of our coach driver, as if he was presenting a children’s TV show, boomed into the microphone.
“ ”, replied absolutely everyone, not even acknowledging his existence, let alone his greeting.
Harsh I know, but it was 5:50am.
The night, all 20 hours of it, had not quite yet finished, and a selection of heavy duty party-goers still reeled from the concert the night before, but my friend Isaac and I were ready for the day.
I say ready, I think it would be more accurate to say that Saturday had arrived and we just happened to still be alive. However, against all the odds, we had awoken, showered and stuffed down a banana before collapsing into our seats ready for our journey.
It was going to be a long one. Bleary-eyed from a lack of sleep and weak from a lack of sufficient breakfast, we huddled in our seats, as silent as the rest of our travel companions. Not a word was uttered.
But believe it or not, we were here by choice.
Our journey began in Tromsø, a delightful city (a medium sized town in the UK), far up in the North of Norway. We were way inside the arctic circle already, but we were heading further north to a little fishing village by the name of Skjervøy (pronounced: Share-vay). The reason? Following the mass congregation of herring in the Fjord, during the winter months Skjervøy becomes a hub for Humpback Whales and Orca.
The sun never rises this far north in December. By 10:15am, a pseudo-dawn appears, as light just about manages to claw itself around the earth’s curvature, barely revealing the barren landscape. And the colours, oh the colours! They were beautiful. It was as if this fjord alone had been coloured with pastels: the icy depths of the sea a deep navy, the sky a faded, paler blue. The mountains almost glowed, the chalky white of their snow-capped peaks glinting in the little light there was, individual snow flakes dancing together, glistening like a natural tiara crowning this glorious planet. Swathes of bulbous cloud hugged tightly to the surrounding mountains, glowing gold in the early morning light, while in places, thin veils of mist hovered just above the surface of the water.
But unlike most dawns, this one never fully materialised. The full light of day never came. The brightness of the sun never managed to peek over the silhouettes of distant mountains. Daytime is bypassed here, irrelevant and obsolete. Dawn becomes dusk in an instant; a disorientating beauty left in it’s place.
As we participated in this most glorious of artworks, to a man, our travel companions perked up. Where there had been silence, there were now whoops and whistles and even a little bit bit of singing from one particularly enthusiastic passenger. Phones came out, cameras emerged and even I regretted only bringing my standard little camera lens.
“Ok listen,” Kristina, our blunt, mono-tonal and borderline-rude guide spoke above the excited buzz. “We are looking for Humpback Whales and Orca. Humpback will be seen by spray from their blowholes. Orca will be seen by their black dorsal fins above the surface. We will look but we need your help.”
The mission had been set. Immediately, 14 pairs of eyes got rigorously to work.
Watching wildlife is healing to my soul. As I gaze into, and explore the stunning creation around me, I am at my most relaxed, most excited, most engaged. I find it deeply satisfying to my very core and afterwards, I feel mentally and physically restored. But despite this, and despite the fact that in reality I am simply sitting and looking, searching for that first glimpse of wildlife can be exhausting. Without really knowing what you are looking for your eyes strain to focus on every inch of your vision, every extreme of your periphery. Every slightly strange wave makes you double take and every strange sound gets you frantically searching for whatever caused it. As we left the main stretch of the Fjord and headed up a smaller inlet, my senses were raging. So many new sights, sounds, colours were overwhelming me.
“Ooh,” a strange noise that sounded worryingly like an emotion escaped the lips of our otherwise dead-pan guide. She pointed. Not out, but up.
A dark shape, at this point still just a silhouette in the sunless dawn, circled above the waters. Slow and laboured, it’s wings locked out in the icy wind, it navigated itself through the air, expertly seeking the very faintest of thermals to ride. An occasional wing-flap gave the game away: there weren’t many. But with wings the size of this creature, thermals were not that necessary.
“White tailed eagle, look!”, Kristina seemed genuinely amazed. Im sure she has seen many before, but perhaps not this close. The winds certainly seemed to be on our side, carrying this magnificent creature right over the boat, probably not more than 20 metres above our heads. It’s wings were astonishing, broad and bulky. It’s tail was like a large white wedge, an arial rudder of vast proportions. Even it’s beak was visible at such close range, almost disproportionately big against its face, a lurid yellow and severely hooked. Known colloquially as “flying barn-doors” because of their size, I began to feel like this name did them a disservice. This Griffin was designed to kill: every inch of it oozed ruthlessness. We were not here to see him, but as he drifted higher and higher into the sky above his kingdom, I felt privileged that he should have chosen to grace us with his imperial presence.
It reminded me of a wildlife-watching truth that can be difficult to swallow at times. You can spend huge amounts of money and dedicate vast amounts of time in pursuit of wildlife, and this may buy you a tiny glimpse, however, for wildlife to reveal itself in all of it’s glory is very often the decision of the individual animal. If and when they choose to do so, they must be appreciated.
And I was very aware that this was true of the whales too.
Inhabiting a dominion that even the hardiest diver would struggle to enter, our chances of viewing these whales was almost completely upon to them. Orca can hold their breath for 15 minutes before needing to surface, humpbacks up to 45 minutes. If they decided to only come up to the surface when necessary, then a glimpse would be all that we could hope for, if we were lucky enough to be looking in the right place at the right time. In theory the odds were slim.
But whales are masters of the ocean. They show up when they like. And they fear no one.
“We are looking for whale now,” Kristina’s voice reached us over the noise of the engine as it began to trail off. We had reentered the main Fjord, and our guides had noticed another boat floating still on the water. I was encouraged, but also a little confused as to what we had been doing before.
There was silence as we waited, putting our hope in our fearsome guides well trained eyes.
“Humpbacks”, came the welcome response. “3, I think.”
And then, as if on cue, accompanied by the sight of water vapour being spewed into the cold arctic air, a leviathan appeared, breaking above the surface of the water. It seemed to linger, then began it’s descent, arcing its large, yet sleek back before slapping its formidable tail onto the undeserving sea. Another followed, then another. Majestic and confident, gracefully in-agile.
To the soft sound of their eruptive exhalation, they travelled, almost as if they were the knobbly grey needles stitching the indigo fjord to the pastel sky above.
In, out, pffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff. Repeat.
They would disappear for a moment, as if it was their curtain-call, suddenly reappearing before their enraptured audience, readily responding to our calls for an encore.
“Oh my Harry,” I heard Isaac mutter gently to himself as much as to me. “Look.”
The words of someone who knows that their words are unnecessary but also cannot keep what they are seeing to themselves.
Three turned to five as two more humpbacks joined the performance. But where the others had been individual masterpieces, these two performed together in mesmerising synchrony. With extraordinary timing they wove the ocean together, a duet that will forever be ingrained upon my mind. And to the disappointed yet appreciating gasps of our motley crew, they gave us one final salute before diving down into the chilled depths of their home.
And we were alone again under the blushing dawn.
“Eeuurrrnng!”
Everyone turned to look at one of our Chinese companions, who was audibly annoyed at their departure.
But not for long. For beneath us and completely out of our sight was a body of water that was absolutely teaming with life. Nutrient rich and to some extent sheltered, herring will gather en-masse in the Norwegian Fjords over the winter. And for the past couple of years, Skjervøy has been their chosen holiday destination. And for many, their graves.
There are not many animals that genuinely unsettle me. I have had chilling experiences: a lion patrolling our lodge in Kenya’s Lake Nakuru National Park and an apoplectic orang-utan having a temper tantrum in Borneo. But at the sight of two tall, erect black dorsal fins breaking the surface and heading in our direction, my heart began beating a whole lot faster, and not out of excitement.
“Orca at 3 o’clock,” Kristina announced their arrival to us. “Two fully grown males.”
Orca. An animal I fear. Huge, intelligent killing machines. You see, for me, all animals have the potential to be dangerous. With their backs to the wall, when all other options have been exhausted, most animals have the capacity to turn and cause serious harm to a person. But it is instinct. It is the most primeval desperation to survive. Or perhaps in some instances, when it’s food source has run out, some animals have been known to predate on people. But again, that is an unfortunate necessity. The truth is that most animals kill only when absolutely necessary.
But orca are the psychopaths of the animal world. Orca kill for fun.
It is not uncommon for large pods of orca to encircle and bring down larger whales for the sake of it, believed by some scientists to be a way of bonding as a pod. On the original Blue Planet, my childhood was haunted by the sight of an agonising pursuit of a grey whale mother and her calf, lasting several hours, only for the baby whale to be separated from it’s mother and killed. Despite the tortuous and exhausting assault, only it’s tongue was eaten, the rest left to drop wastefully to the ocean depths.
Why? Quite simply because the can. They knew another meal was not far away. They are that good.
So as the black hull of two large males broke the surface like the dreaded sight of a nuclear submarine, effortlessly slicing through the water, my heart pounded in both terror and excitement. I knew orca patrolled these waters, and here they were.
My first reaction was to gawp at the startling height of their dorsal fins, slicing through through the icy water with ease. It was these that identified them as male. They really were remarkable: periscopes that enhanced their submarine-like appearance. My second reaction was to notice their speed: they were by no means rushing, but as they carved the ocean surface, they created waves, frothing around their sleek black hulls. Unlike the Humpbacks, who were given away by their loud exhalations, these ova travelled in deathly silence, only betrayed by the protesting splash of water escaping from them as they broke the surface. My third reaction was to realise that these two titan were not only swimming straight towards our boat, they were probably as the same size as it.
In case I hadn’t mentioned, we were not in a ship, not a traditional fishing boat as you may think. We were crammed into a tiny RIB, craving, not only sightings of whales, but intimacy. Within touching distance of the oceans surface and fully exposed to the all the elements, there is no better way to watch these impressive creatures. Small enough to drive very close without disturbing the whales and agile enough to change direction quickly, with visibility good on all sides, our view was perfect. And as they swam effortless towards us, it dawned on me that the Orca may have been thinking the same. About 20 metres from our boat, they dived. My heart was beating very quickly.
A soft “oooh” was murmered among the passengers.
“Eeuurrrnng!”, declared our Chinese friend.
We all looked at him again.
The fjord was still for a few moments, the two killers leaving no trace that they had ever been there. I began to wonder if they had followed the humpbacks example and dived. But with a nautical fizz their sleek faces broke the surface of the waves just to the side of the boat. Slowly, lethargically, yet with a real ease they journeyed alongside our boat, sometimes submerging for a few moments before reappearing moments later somewhere else, almost miraculously moving. As if choreographed, scripted, they appeared on each side of the boat, and they were close! As they broke the surface, we were close enough that I was able to look them in their strangely small eyes. Which got me thinking. These orca could have dived, they could have swum off. But they hadn’t, in fact, they had changed their position around the boat constantly. I suddenly began to wonder who was watching who. And if they had paid as much as I had…
It was true, we had paid an extraordinary amount to come and watch these whales, making the most of the three hours of not-quite-daylight. But where I had expected perhaps one distant sighting of a whale of some description, guided by the slightly terrifying Kristina, we didn’t just see whales, we spent time with them. After convoying with the two male orca for what seemed like an age, we were distracted by another pod of humpbacks part rolling the other side of the frothing fjord. And that’s the thing. Whereas we started not knowing what we were looking for, it didn’t take long before we were able to spot whales without Kristina’s help. And they were everywhere. Within metres of us, a three females breached the surface. Not long after, we were treated to the company of two mothers, each with playful young calves. I say playful, they literally played in front of us, gambolling in the water, playing an orca version of tag.
As the light began to fade, at 1pm, and the temperature began to drop even further, we reluctantly headed back to base. Engrossed in the exhibition in front of me, I hadn’t realised just how cold I was. I couldn’t feel my toes, and even my heavily gloved hands were tortoise-like in their movements. This was a land, almost inhospitable table to humans. As I reached the shore, relieved but also thrilled at what I had witnessed, I was able to appreciate how little I belonged in these beautiful creature’s domain. Isaac and I flopped out of our Michelin man suits and devoured a mediocre sandwich that at the time tasted utterly sublime. Thin, vulnerable creatures, blessed with big brain, humans have found a way to explore every region on this earth, but as far as I am concerned, I belong in the warm!
“Eeuurrrnng!”
Isaac and I exchanged a glance. What had disgusted our Chinese friend now? The sandwich, the company? His girlfriend?
No apparently he just clears his throat as if he’s just been told that his house is being repossessed by the man who man who ran over his dog.
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