Ever Looked into A Whale’s Eye

It’s whale time of year! So many whale videos lately! Breaching, jumping, having baby whales, humans swimming with them — I never get tired of them.

Breaching the Blue – © LYON 2025

Makes me remember one of the best things I ever did in my life. I sailed from Kauai to California in August, 1984. It was just me and Skipper, an older guy from California, on his beautiful 31-foot double-ender ketch.*

We saw dolphins every evening at 5:00. Never failed. The first time it happened, on our second day out, I was sitting at the very point of the prow of the boat, my legs hanging down, my toes just barely able to dip into the bow wave upon down-bounce.

I was just spacing out, happy as a clam at high tide. Suddenly, I looked up, and there was this funny kind of frothy boiling thing right on the horizon. Alarmed, I jumped up and called, “Skipper! What’s that???”

He came up next to me, and we hung on the shrouds leaning out, trying to see.

In only a few minutes, it became clear — it was a huge pod of dolphins, swishing, swirling, jumping, and having a General Blast, getting closer and closer.

At last, they were upon us, leaping in and out of our bow wave, jumping so high it looked like they were being yanked from above, and swimming right along side as we sped along.

And then, days later, on the evening we were 3 days out from Santa Cruz, they didn’t appear. I waited and waited, but nope — no dolphins. Why? What happened? I was so sad — they had become my best treat of the day. Was it because we were in the shipping lane now? They didn’t feel safe?

That night, I took the dawn watch — 4 a.m. to 8 a.m. Dawn watch is hard — you can’t sleep, but everything in you wants to. You get up and walk the deck, then flop back down by the compass in the cockpit, wishing time would speed up so you could go below and get horizontal.

You wrap your blanket around your knees, scrunch down a little more, floof your scarf up around your neck, hide your hands in your pockets. The damp air slides by your face — although cold, it feels so fresh and alive. The stars are a billion pinpricks in the great dome of the sky, so many of them you could reach out and scoop them up with your wee human hands.

The dark becomes grey, the sun seems late, but you know you can trust it, that it’s on its way. For a short time, there is no horizon, the water, glassy, reflects the lightening air.

Shades of color begin to leak into the sky — soft lavenders, pinks. It’s so entrancing, that time of day — it’s still dark, but the gods wave that tease of color at you reminding you that yes, day really is dependable, and is almost here, just be patient a little longer.

At 6:00, Skipper is below, snoring. I glance over the side of the boat and see shadows. Big shadows. As long as the boat, shadows. Longer, some of them.

Cautiously, silently, I get up and kneel on the deck, lean on the rails, peer down at them. I lost count after 5 — they were moving around, switching places. I bet there were a good twenty of them.

I’m thinking, hey whatever you are, I sure hope you stay away from the hull! Any one of them could bump us slightly and we’d be in red hot trouble.

One of the shadows came closer, closer, close enough to see — whale! Well, duh, I’m thinking, what else would it be? But when you’re out days away from land and a pod of dark shadows surrounds you, you aren’t really quite in your logical mind.

You push your fear away and choose awe and wonder, instead. Are they really whales? Maybe it’s a bunch of monsters from the deep! Aliens, even! I laughed out loud, delighted and scared, one of those short, barky kind of laughs. Oops! I’d been trying to be so quiet!

The whale turned on its side, allowing its eye to come close to the surface, right near where I sat. We stared at each other for a million years, for way too short a time, when it turned back under and slid away.

One at a time, the others slowly took turns and came to greet me, each one seeming to have its own personality and manner. How did I ever know that? No clue. It’s just what I felt. My heart felt like it would explode with joy/wonder/awe/happiness.

It was full light now, the dawn colors spread across a cloudless sky, a feast of brilliant blues and yellows, deep pinks and purples and carmine reds. I’d never seen a dawn like that — as if it was tired of the sweetness of dawn, and wanted to play Garish Sunset for once.

The whales cruised alongside as the sky lit up. The reflection of all that light on the waves made it hard to see them now, their shadowy forms more like ghosts than dark, corporeal bodies.

And suddenly, they were gone. Poof! As if they’d never been there!

I can still feel how my heart about fell to my feet, surprise tears springing from my eyes, feeling completely bereft. As if I’d been torn from my happiest birthday party and thrown into a dark, gloomy dungeon.

I wept — from missing them, from loving them, from the sheer joy of seeing them, from knowing how lucky I’d been to see and visit with them — all of those. That deep, belly kind of weeping. I was so sad and glad and amazed and full I thought maybe I’d fall overboard.

I slouched back into the cockpit, stripped of energy. Skipper came up on deck, not having seen or heard a thing, took the watch; I stumbled below to lie in grateful amazement before sleep took me.

I wondered if the dolphins would come back later on that night.

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So now you know what breaching, playing, birthing, splashing whales remind me of!

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*double-ender ketch – in lay terms, a two-masted sailboat with two pointy ends, instead of a pointy front and flat rear end.

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