Elwen likens the humpback population explosion to the spread of a virus. “You have the very long, slow period of not much happening, but there is growth and then it eventually goes ‘whoop!’ and increases rapidly.”
It was on the brink of New Year when Monique and Chris, together with their three dogs, slept in sheltered anchorage on the deck of their small boat in the hopes of photographing a super-group. They had heard from whale watching companies in the area that whales were gathering, and their aim was to photograph as many as possible of them and then submit their images to Happywhale, a citizen science project that aims to photo-ID marine mammals globally.
The couple awoke at 03:45, before sunrise, in pursuit of the best possible lighting for their subjects. Then, in the mist of early morning, they set off.
They moved slowly, turning the boat’s engine off every few minutes to “simply drift and listen”, says Chris. “When the whales breach you can hear them from miles away, so we would head in that direction. As we got closer those breaches sounded like huge bombs going off as the 40-plus tonne whales leapt out and then crashed into the ocean.”
