This Ain’t Just A Fluke!

My husband used to work for an American company. We were invited to Presidents Week — a week-long beano for “high-fliers” at a five-star beach resort in Mexico.

One day, we went on a boat trip across a huge bay to an island, where we rode the most placid horses in the world to a waterfall-fed swimming hole and then on to a shallow beach for lunch, sunbathing, and a little light snorkelling, before returning to the boat. It was an okay day — pleasant enough.

Until, on the way back…

Out on the bay, a fluke (a whale’s tail) was spotted right in our path. Then another. And another, and another. A huge pod of humpback whales — around forty —was suddenly just… there.

It gets better. They started breaching — that “jump” up into the air, to come crashing back down into the water. They started small but built up and up until up to seven whales were fully out of the water at a time.

We kept our distance and just watched. It wasn’t safe (for us or the whales) to try to continue, as we had no idea where the next one was coming from. It was possibly the most exhilarating sight of my life.

My husband and I were quietly chatting with the English-speaking local guide and the crew. He’d been a guide on this sort of trip for twenty-four years, some of them had been doing it longer, and the captain was a man easily well into his eighties who had spent his entire life out on the water. None of them had ever seen anything like it in their entire lives, nor had they heard of anyone seeing anything like it.

It was well worth being an hour and a half late returning to the dock — though one “princess” threw a fit about that.