I came to South Africa attracted by the action happening when millions of sardines migrate from the south to the north east coast of Africa, but I never thought I was going to be in such close proximity to a species 800 times bigger!… I had the unbelievable chance of coming face to face with a humpback whale. And this was one of the most exciting, inspiring and (a bit) scary moments that I have been in my whole life!

It all started on the boat of African Watersports, in the South Coast of KwaZulu Natal. I saw for the first time humpback whales swimming next to the boat. They are fast, elusive and sometimes playful. Their mission is to travel to Mozambique to give birth, so they normally don’t care about the boat or the swimmers at all. They can jump so high, that they can almost take their whole body out of the water! Imagine watching 40 tons gliding out of the water surface right in front of your boat! It is an incredible feeling. No one really knows why they exhibit this behaviour. There are three main hypothesis: 1) They probably do it to remove the parasites on their skin surface; 2) for social interaction to attract females or 3) to compete between males.

What scientist are really sure about is that humpback whales are one of the largest mammals on Earth and they migrate thousands of kilometres every year. Having a close encounter with this whales in the South African east coast is hectic. First you have to spot a whale or a group of whales and get close to it. They blow air through their spiracle that can be seen from a long distance. The problem is that they don‘t always swim on the surface. If it was like that, it would be very easy to interact with them, but instead, they dive very deep between each breath. So as soon as you are close to one or more they can immediately dive underwater, where they hide from the curious passengers on board of a boat. 

Till date I have seen these whales in three different places of the east coast of South Africa: At Mbotyi River Lodge with Walter Bernardis (invited by Michael Aw); at Umkomaas with Clare Daly and her husband Ryan who are bull shark’s researchers and friends of my lovely host, the whale enthusiast, Beth Neale, and finally at Port Elizabeth with Expert Tours! They are all very experienced in making these encounters possible and they are all very responsible and do their best to minimize the potential impacts of tourism activities (boat noise and swimmers interference for example) to these cetaceans. Therefore, their strategy involves finding the whales, following them for a while and understanding its/their behaviour. If the whale(s) is(are) curious towards the boat, then it is ok to swim with them, but when they try to avoid the boat or the swimmers, we normally stop our attempt of interacting with them. As a tourist, your only task is to choose a responsible tour operator for your trip and follow their instructions! When the skipper screams a loud: “GO!”, just… GOOO!!! If you don’t do it in that exact moment, you may miss one of the best opportunities of your life. After jumping from the boat, normally you should swim where the whales are. Obviously this all happens so fast that the quality of the encounter depends more on your good luck and on the mood of the whale(s) than on your swimming skills. But you have to look for them. They could be in front of you and you might miss them because the visibility of the water is not always good. Finally when you are in front of the whale(s), the feeling is indescribable. Being in front of one, or maybe more, of these creatures releases me of every other thinking. There is nothing you can do more than hold your camera to show others the beauty of the moment you experienced with these giants.

I jumped from a boat to encounter humpback whales approximately 40 times and from those, I had just two high quality moments. The first one was in front of Mbotyi River Lodge with my friend Mick Valos, who was the one who always jumped first and had the best encounters! From him I learnt those powerful words in the title. He was next to me and we saw three passing right next to us. My other friend Kathryn Carl was just in front of the biggest one and had a once in a life time experience. You can see all this action in the video I took! The second epic encounter I had with a humpback was in Port Elizabeth with Expert Tours. I jumped out of the boat and swam next to Jean Tresfon directly to the whales. It was a group of 4 or 5 males following a female and one of them just swam towards me. After seeing me, it went diving. The visibility was not so good and everything happened very fast. But anyways I hope you enjoy the video!

Thanks for reading!

Elena