Humpback Whale.
Photo by Tani Church.

Well, my buddy Harry Westlin and I used to dive very frequently. Harry was kind of an interesting guy because he is a nervous Nellie diving. He is one of those guys who is really cautious and careful, which was just fine.

So one day late February we loaded up my boat, the Mighty Katie Mermaid, and decided we were going to go acquire some dungeness crab. We cruised up Saganauh Channel out by Shelter Island and into Hand Trollers cove where we decided to drop the hook in fairly shallow water, 40 to 50 feet of water and slide off and start picking up dungeness. Well, dungeness crab fishing that day was absolutely superb.

Diving for dungeness is kind of entertaining; if you don’t dig them out of the sand you end up having to chase them for a while. I myself have overworked my regulator several times chasing dungeness crab around and they are fast. They kind of get up, half fly, half float and boogie along. This particular day we had gone out and acquired a fair amount of dungeness, our quota for the day, which is twenty each.

So we’d been down about 15 minutes or so. It was one of those really nice beautiful days, fairly warm out, upper 30’s - low 40’s, crystal clear, blue sky, calm seas, and visibility was 80 feet. All of the sudden the lights went out and it got dark! I looked over at Harry and Harry looked at me and signaled "Let’s go up," and I signaled "Hold on, let's just see what’s going on."

The next thing, I know I see is this huge object about the size of a bus actually plummeting down towards us. Harry looked at me and signaled, "I am out of here." He left big mud puff trails from his fins beating up the very sharp incline that identifies Hand Trollers Cove. I couldn’t catch him, so as I turn around, watching Harry go one way, I looked at this bus-sized object coming toward me, and my heart was beating like a bunny.

All of the sudden a humpback whale comes into view. It swam up within about a meter of me, and I see this whale's eye looking at me, regarding me while I hovered there in 50 feet of water. I was just amazed that the whale can put on the brakes, stop and hover right there.

As I stared at the whale, I felt a bump on the back of my knees, and I couldn’t figure out what bumped me. I thought that maybe Harry came back, so I turn around and there was a baby humpback whale. I was sandwiched right between Mom and baby humpback whale, and thinking "Oh God! She is going to stamp me into hairy bouillabaisse." I thought that there was no way that I was going to live through this whole thing, and I tried to extricate myself out of there without seeming too hostile.

The interesting thing was neither whale was particularly bothered or upset with my presence. They both looked at me like I was a lost buddy, so over the next 30 minutes I had repeated visits by both humpback whales. They would go up and get a breath and would come back down and find me.

I started working myself back over to my boat because I was getting low on air. As I got close to my boat, they continued to come back and swim with me side by side, almost like they were escorting me. I felt priviledged to be amongst these incredibly intelligent lifeforms. I actually felt safe and honored.

So I swam back to the boat, literally extracting the last four molecules of air out of my cylinder. When I finally got back up to the surface and looked down in the water, they were swimming around under the boat. They would surface, swim around and under the boat, then come up and kind of roll over and look at me on the surface. It was as if they were checking up on me to be sure I was okay.

Harry, in the meantime, was on the beach. He wanted me to come up to the beach in my fiberglass boat and pick him up!

I said, "No Harry, swim out", and Harry replied, "No way, there are humpback whales out there!" So eventually I had to go up to the beach, and rescue him.

It was one of the most spectacular dives in Alaska I've ever done.

Editor's Note: Instructor/owner John Lachelt of Channel Dive Center has over 700 dives under his weight belt, just this year.