Here we spent precious moments face to face with humpback whales. For about 30 minutes, in few minute chunks over 4 days, we swam on the surface as these huge creatures stopped by long enough for us to glimpse them.

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Humpback whales are, as whales go, pretty small. But on a human scale, they are enormous. Fifty feet long and 30 tons. To reach that size, they eat a LOT of tiny things, mostly small fish and krill (shrimp). But rather than spread this out over an entire year, all humpbacks (except a group in the Arabian Sea) migrate. They feed in cool waters then move to tropical areas for breeding and rearing young. The calves need warmer water while they build up their insulating blubber.

There are several standard migration paths used by various populations of humpback whales. In the Eastern Pacific, on the West coast of the US, we are accustomed to whales feeding North in Alaska in summer, traveling down to Mexico (or Hawaii), then returning up north and passing by San Francisco in early Spring.

In the South Pacific, whales feed in Antartica and then travel north to tropical Tonga or French Polynesia. Tonga, on the Western edge of Polynesia, is believed to be an especially great spot because of the navigable Tonga trench leading to protected shallow and warm waters. Humpback whales are seen in many other Pacific islands, but each population or “tribe” seems to be very loyal, returning to the same area year after year.

Humpback whales have a complicated history with humans. We’ve revered them, hunted to them near extinction, and protected them with international treaties. Today they support a huge tourism industry around the world in whale watching, and humpbacks are one of the most beloved and studied whales because they are so easy (relatively) to observe.

In many places, whale watching - viewing whales above the surface from a boat - is a fairly benign activity. Boats stay a safe distance from whales, don’t run their engines loudly or chase whales, and adult whales can relatively easy avoid them.  But in other places multiple boats crowd around whales, provoking behavior that signals distress or anger from whales but to tourists can look exciting (e.g. loud fin slaps). We’ve never personally experienced this (maybe because our whale watching has been mostly in the US) but we’ve heard many warnings to avoid bad operators.

While whale watching from above the water is a common activity, only a few countries allow getting in the water with humpback whales, and only for snorkeling (not free diving or scuba diving).  This is commonly called “swimming with whales” and it really is 

 not just passive snorkeling, they move fast and you swim to keep up for as long as you can. Our research yielded Tonga as one of the most restrictive in policies (to protect the whales) and consistent in enforcement, so we found a well-reviewed operator and, with some trepidation, booked our trip.

Picture yourself next to a school bus. The door is human sized but the entire thing is hulking. You can see it coming down the block, when it stops next to parked cars it stretches past 3 or 4, painting it takes 5 to 10 days. Now imagine that bus can move in 3 dimensions. And is alive. And  has an eye as big as a grapefruit. That’s an incredible thing to see from the water.

In Tonga, whales sightings are nearly constant in the season. The problem isn’t seeing a whale. The problem is finding one in the right conditions - calm and slow. A sleeping mom and calf pair is ideal. Whales sleep with half their brains at a time, the other half keeping them swimming and coming to the surface to breathe. While moms might stay hidden underwater for a long time, calves have to surface to breathe every few minutes. Slow for a whale is very fast for a human. Think of industrious ants you pass on a hike - they are working hard but you easily stride past hundreds of them.

When visibility is good, you can watch the mom constantly and see the calf returning to her. With poor visibility the guide may free dive down to look for them, but tourists are not allowed. Luckily we didn’t experience visibility worse than this.

Humans are required to stay 5m from the whales, but the whales don’t have any rules. Curious calves did sometimes come closer. 5m feels extremely close to such huge animals, we rarely got that close. From that range you cannot see the entire animal. While our most common sight was a mom and calf, sometimes they would be joined by an "escort". Escorts are other adult whales, often males but sometimes females, that join the mom and calf for part of their journey. We don’t really understand how these relationships works or why they form.

A calf (far left) swims towards the surface next to mom, with an escort just below. This is a still from our friend's video, see the 

Tonga has a tiny population - only 100,000 residents spread out over three main regions across a few hundred miles.

[South] Tongatopu and nearby islands with the capital, Nuku’alofa, 

[North] Va’vau, home of fancier resorts and a haven for “cruisers” who travel in their sailboats or yachts across the Pacific.

We stayed on Uoleva, a small sandy island in the Ha’apai group in central Tonga. The island used to be an important place for Tongan chiefs. There are several “pigeon mounds” built by chiefs throughout Tonga, and at least 8 on Uoleva alone, including Tonga’s largest.  Supposedly these were used for an upperclass sport of snaring pigeons.

Uoleva island from above. Its coastline is almost entirely beautiful white sand beaches. There are a few small Western style resorts on the island, but we stayed in local-style huts on the beach. Our beach was that corner in the middle of the island!

Today Uoleva is mostly inhabited only during whale season in 5 small resorts. We stayed at Diana Resort, a collection of single-room beach huts with no electricity and shared bathrooms. This was a much more rustic setup than we chose for the rest of our Sabbatical (we actually chose it mainly because it was the only well-reviewed operator still available when we booked 6 months in advance), but we greatly enjoyed the experience. Perhaps due to the price or the lack of creature comforts, everyone we met there was extremely friendly, kind-hearted, and readily shared great stories.

We forgot to take our own photos of our digs but here are a few from the resort's Facebook:

Our hosts were a Tongan family who live near the property year round. The resort is currently run by a main couple who took over the resort from the wife’s parents. The husband drives the boat and wife is a whale guide, while their teenage kids help out the local staff of 2 deckhands and a cook. These days the wife only guides when there is excess demand, the rest of the time they use Sherry.

Sherry, originally from Texas, is a free spirit, with waist-length sun-bleached hair, tattoos of all sorts covering her body, and plenty of stories from hallucinogen-fuelled mind journeys. She is also a serious athlete and coaches elite basketball in the US during the rest of the year.

Our group dove with Sherry every day, and her respect for whales was visible and deep. She and the captain were often monitoring multiple groups of whales in the area, looking for signs that a mother might be amenable to humans joining her calf in the water. If the whales were moving too fast, breaching, slapping their tails or fins, chasing each other to breed or fight, etc we wouldn’t get in the water.

Unfortunately we didn’t get to know the Tongan family well. They spoke English but kept to themselves, not interested in my attempts to draw them into conversation. From Sherry, who has been semi-adopted into the family, we learned that they are a very tight-knit group. Families in Tonga often sleep in a single room, and find it so uncomfortable to sleep alone that Sherry's requests to do so were never honored. They constantly tell jokes and rib each other, but also require strict deference to the elders.

Note: we've used fake names since we didn’t ask everyone if it was okay to share their info.

We met a young Welshman on a year-long voyage - from him we learned that dodgeball is a professional sport (he’s played on the  Wales, Ireland and UK teams) and that Asador is an amazing restaurant in Singapore (more on that later). A pair of young sisters from Germany, one studying medicine and passionate about horses and protecting all animals, the other a bartender who travels the world on short-term working holiday visas serving fun characters in bars. A young Italian couple who met on a train locking their bikes together - they were great fun, amorous and animated - not sure if due to being Italian or newly in love.  These folks were all in their late 20s, at 34 we’ve never felt so old!   Most were also avid scuba divers, including the Italian woman who currently works as an elite ski instructor but is also a serious tech diver and has worked as a dive instructor.  Even though we only stayed 5 days, we had plenty of time to get to know each other - meals were served communally and everyday we spent ~8 hours on the boat together, chatting while scanning for whales.

Also staying at the resort, but with less time on the boat with us, was three generations of a lovely New Zealand family. Over meals they reminisced about their time in Zimbabwe’s in the early 1980s when the people were hopeful about their newly independent nation, and had many stories from the grandfather’s life as a professor of agriculture working with developing nations all over the world.  They had 3 little kids with them, the youngest being an adorable 9 month old daughter enjoying her first trip abroad.

Whale calves are a little bigger than human toddlers.

One day a middle-aged man and woman joined our whaling trip from a sailboat docked off our beach, Greg and Emily. They were fun-loving and had a natural rapport with each other, so I assumed they were married. No, they had met 6 months earlier as the two crew members for this boat - he was from England and she from Vancouver. They had both been looking for something different in life and signed up for a season (of indeterminate length) sailing around the world with their Australian captain, Tom. The trio met in the Caribbean, sailed through the Panama Canal, across the Pacific to French Polynesia, and then were hanging out  in Tonga to play tourist, repair the boat, and wait for the right weather conditions to cross to New Zealand. Captain Tom, who they spoke of with love and respect, had struck it rich early and now sailed around the world for fun. We didn’t meet Tom (he was busy getting boat supplies) but they described him as an excellent and resourceful cook, a genius handyman, and incredibly lucky - constantly wiggling getting out of tough spots that inevitably arise in such journeys.

Greg, Emily and Tom had connected on “sailing crew tinder” (aka a professional matchmaking site) and were delighted to find they all got along so well.

Emily had a solid career sitting at a desk when she got restless and joined the Canadian coast guard. She loved the mission (it’s one of the few services like it not part of a military), teamwork, and most of the job but the  structure was killer. A month on a vessel with 12 hour shifts every day, followed by a month off, then moving to a new vessel. It’s exhausting and led many of her colleagues to unhealthy coping mechanisms, or even suicide. So after a full year of service she was ready for a change.

Greg was returning to sailing after decades. As a young man he sailed and did all sorts of odd jobs to earn money, once finding himself in Thailand on “shore leave” chatting with a beautiful English flight attendant. They kept meeting there in short bursts and eventually he convinced her to leave her boyfriend, then stop seeing another guy, then date him. And she convinced him to join the airlines. He enjoyed a long career traveling to new places constantly instead of working fixed routes. But last year he retired and with his kids were off at college and his wife happy with her own retirement pursuits, so became restless as well and returned to the sea.

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