A Whale of a time

Tony Wu · Issue 9, Oct/Nov 2002 · pp. 14–18

Products mentioned: Nikon F90x, Nexus housing, RDPIII

The ocean is big. Amazingly, I hadn’t really felt it before. On reef dives, land is nearby, and with reasonable visibility, you can see the bottom, or at least the vertical face of the reef. Here, there was only blue - left, right, front, back, down, even the sky above. My entire field of vision, my entire existence at the moment was blue - interrupted only by an 11 metre juvenile sperm whale chewing on my fins. It had taken fourteen months of planning to get to this place and situation. On my previous visits, I had met and become friends with Takahashi- san, the owner and captain of “Dancing Whale”, the 16-metre boat he uses to take visitors on dolphin and whale watching trips. Takahashi-san had come to the Bonin islands nearly two decades earlier, long before there were many visitors from mainland Japan. Even today, relatively few people journey to the islands due to distance. The Boni…