Humpback beauties and the infinite ocean

"You see the smile that's on my mouth. It's hiding the words that don't come out."

Swimming with humpbacks clearly does something to your perspective with life. Despite the fact that I have met these beauties before, I get so overwhelmed by their presence. Sometimes a humpback mother and its calf are just resting in the water. The calf is eating and the mother pushes it to the surface every now and then for air. And sometimes the calf starts exploring the surroundings to later get back to its mother and the safe haven. It is a pretty scene. So peaceful in the middle of the sometimes rocky waves. Usually I see the calf first. The white pattern in the dark blue water makes it visible and I think to myself that this is a huge whale. Then I see the mother and I totally lose perspective on size until my husband swims a bit closer to take a photo and it is a mind bending exercise to really get a concept of it all. We are so small. 

"All of these lines across my face. Tell you the story of who I am. So many stories of where I've been. And how I got to where I am."

And if we get too close, the mother is moving her quite sharp five metre flipper, giving us an evil whale eye and we move back a little. One doesn’t mess with a 15 metres long and 35 000 kilo heavy humpback mother. One just doesn’t. We try to swim beside them before they eventually flip their back tails above the water to dive down towards the blue depth and we hear these majestic friends sing long after we lose sight of them. It feels like they have seen everything. And they encourage us to be patient. And brave. 

"But these stories don't mean anything. When you've got no one to tell them to. It's true; I was made for you."

Tonga is a small Kingdom in the Pacific. It is like an archipelago of small islands and when you hit the outer parts it is just unbroken horizon of an infinite ocean. And here we meet up with friends during the first evening. We met a year ago in completely other waters and for some reason life brings us together exactly here this specific evening. And the first morning, a man is introducing himself to the people on the boat before he looks at me and says “I recognise you, we are from the same place and we went to the same school”. It feels like the right place to connect to new people or people from the past. As if I see things with different eyes, better connected to the everythingness of life. I guess that is what the big ocean and its huge whales do to us. I feel grateful and humble while I am trying to keep humpback speed in the Pacific ocean.

Quotes from Brandi Carlile's - The Story