By Esther C. Baird
First published in the Chronicle Transcript May 7, 2021
This last April vacation week our family went to Maui, Hawaii. Going to Hawaii from the East Coast is never an easy undertaking, but doing it in COVID times is like getting the golden ticket to Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. Well, except my ticket looked more like a Mai Tai. To their credit though, the COVID numbers hovered around the whopping count of two while we were there. So, they win.
One of the things we love about Maui is that we can simply walk off any beach into the crystal clear waters and see a huge variety of marine life, from fish to eels to my favorite, the sea turtle. I went out multiple times a day to swim and observe the turtles as they serenely passed me by looking more like creatures of flight than water with their large graceful flippers slowly waving up and down.
But the other thing under all that water, is the Northern Pacific Humpback Whale. The giant creatures feed and bulk-up in Alaska during the summer with the long daylight hours and dazzling scenery (let’s assume they enjoy the scenery in their cetacean way), but then they head to Hawaii for winter with its everything-that’s-good-and-beautiful-in-the-world sort of vibe.
Sign me up to be a migratory whale, I’m totally in.
In Hawaii, they breed and have their little car-sized calves, and generally hang out from November through early April. So when we were there last week, we saw some stragglers — not quite ready to return to Alaska — obviously the smartest of the pod. They were far off on the horizon, breaching, blowing water and generally exuding extreme happiness with their life choices.
It wasn’t until we booked a snorkeling trip that we realized how many there were beyond the few we saw. Our boat took us out to the Molokini crater — a mostly submerged ancient volcano that makes for fabulous snorkeling among the ancient lava fingers.
Regular readers may know that one of my hidden talents is my ability to dive fairly deep, it’s a useful talent to have in almost no way at all other than each year when we have to set moorings over at our family camp on the lake. I’m the one that dives down with pliers and shackle pins, often contracting early stage hypothermia. “America’s Got Talent,” sign me up!
However, what we learned from our captain was that at the crater, we could hear the whales underwater, and the deeper we went, the louder and clearer they became. It was my moment to shine, and down I went with our GoPro.
It was fantastic. The whale songs were a combination of low, long humming sounds, almost like the single stroke of a cello, layered with shorter, higher squeaking sounds. Once I knew what I was hearing, it was all I did. Dive, listen, surface, repeat. Pufferfish and angel fish and giant schools of Hawaii’s state fish, the Humuhumunukunukuapua (say that five times fast!), all swam by and were brilliant, but mostly I wanted to keep diving down to hear the whales. The sounds came from everywhere and were all around us as we swam. We were swimming in songs.
At one point my mask, which fit ok but not great, started to tighten to my face on my deeper dives. My ability to pressurize my ears quickly and easily is basically my complete bag of snorkeling tricks, and I did that, but still the mask felt pinchy and wrong, so I came up after one, ok fine, possibly two (three?) final dives. It was addictive diving down to hear the whales, despite the growing discomfort. But I knew I needed to get back on the boat.
“I bet I have a few pinprick burst blood vessels under my eye,” I said as I boarded.
I promptly followed that line of thinking with a plate of food, a cold beer, and a review of all the whale songs I’d recorded.
Later that night I saw that not only did I have some minor bruising under my eye, but a vessel actually in my eye had burst, giving me that vacation friendly look of being punched. My husband gently wondered if my snorkeling might take a pause the rest of the trip.
“But then how would I hear the whales?” I asked him.
Still, I knew I had to stay closer to the surface, and yet when I went out and hovered off the beach the next day, I could still hear them! I looked it up, and sure enough humpback whale songs can be heard by humans for a few miles, and often by simply putting your head underwater if you know what to listen for.
On our last day in Hawaii, I walked out into the water and let myself sink down a few feet. I closed my eyes and listened. Still there, still singing. I’m pretty sure they were singing about how crazy people live in the cold north while all the smart mammals come to Hawaii for winter.
A song I am happy to have finally learned.