Stories from the Deep by Ken O’Sullivan

Author:Ken O’Sullivan [O’Sullivan, Ken]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780717186532
Publisher: Gill
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Freediving to film a passing blue whale: this is the only shot I have which gives a true sense of the scale of the animal.

I eventually got within maybe ten metres of one of the blue whales, but it was diving and I struggled to follow it, then after a long swim when I was already well out of breath, one animal swam maybe eight metres under me, I had to take a second to catch one more breath, which meant I timed my dive just fractionally too late, and the whale was again too far away to capture its detail. After six hours of this, I was exhausted – in the water I was looking up at the RIB, my arms now just jelly, Michael saw the state of me, he and James reached over and pulled me up into the boat. I’d given everything, but still not had the shot we needed. We did shoot loads of video of the animals above water and I got lots of good stills photos, which would be useful for photo identification.

We began the return journey to our home port of Madalena, Pico, somewhat elated, but I knew in my heart I’d missed the key part of any story I could tell about the blue whale. On the way back we encountered two humpback whales, a relatively rare sighting around the Azores. I managed a few more swims having recovered a bit, but couldn’t get close to them. On turning into the channel between Pico and Faial, we gasped – it had been a beautiful sunny day, I had a diver’s tan, an oval-shaped sunburned face and pure white under the wetsuit hood. But now we saw a true Atlantic squall between us and our port, dark, foreboding cloud, dumping its contents of fingernail-sized hail stones on anything that dared stray into its path. We braced ourselves, Michael told us we could either drive slowly to lessen the impact of the hail, which would take much longer, or drive quickly and suffer more for a shorter time. We asked him to do what he felt was right. It was like someone shooting small stones out of an air gun directly into your face, you simply couldn’t keep your eyes open and needed an arm to cover your face.

In a harbourside café, over a cold, crisp Portuguese cerveja, we tried to grasp the enormity of the day. It had taken me two years to get to this point, between research, funding applications, more of the same, then fitness training, equipment preparation, getting us all out to the islands and ready – and in reality I knew I’d missed the moment. Albeit the poor water visibility wasn’t my fault, perhaps younger, fitter men would have managed to get those last two or three metres closer to the whale, but there was no point pondering that. We enjoyed the feeling, went to bed and got up to do it all again.

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