We were woken up from sleep in our anchorage in La Cruz de Huanacaxle by what at first sounded like the low moaning of a ghost or the keening of a ghoul. Is Davy Jones haunting us from his locker or better yet Jack Sparrow? As the groaning continued and morphed into chirrups, blips and long high pitched squeals we realized that it was whale song we were hearing. For almost two hours we lay smiling and wondering at the solo a cappella. I had my ear pressed to the side of the hull (that outside is under water) to get a better earful, needlessly really as the strange sounds filled the boat as though it was the sound box of an old gramophone player.

I recently read a book called "Fluke" by Tim Moore, which is a novel, set in Hawaii all about Humpback Whales and their song. Only the male humpbacks sing and some evidence shows that the pod's song changes when they move geographically. In a pod all the males sing the same song, in long complicated phrases that they repeat over and over. The singer's heart rate slows and he lies head down, suspended vertically in the water throughout his recital. He will breathe every 15 minutes but continue his song afterwards Scientists do not know exactly why humpback males sing. It may be related to mating, but not enough evidence has been found to prove it. It may be that they just like it and that the younger males of the pod learn the song from the older ones. Whatever the reasons, the song we heard moved us in a very organic way. We felt it through our bones as much as we heard it and when he abruptly stopped singing, there was an odd emptiness all around us.

The next morning we found out that a boat on the outer edge of the anchorage had been insistently bumped by a whale for some of the night, giving the boat's occupants several hours of concern and no sleep. What it all meant and how close he was to us we will never know. He sounded close enough but vibrations and sound travel easily underwater so we cannot be sure. The song may not even have come from the same whale that was messing around with the boat. It was an amazing and surreal first experience of whale song and since that night I find myself stopping what I am doing in the boat to listen, just in case I am missing the opening bars of another aria.

The photo, and there are two more of this one in the gallery in the right margin, was taken on our way from Banderas Bay to Chimela, after we rounded Cabo Corrientes. We had seen him/her leaping and slapping the water from quite a long way off. She did not notice us since she was being very active and on our course we found ourselves within 30 meters of her. I was clicking away and Richard changed course so that we would not get into the path of her antics. Then she saw us and dived under the boat. It was closer than we wanted really and a bit scary, but luckily all was well.

Whales are the largest animals to live on the earth, ever! They are much bigger than any of the dinosaurs and I continually marvel at how cool it is to be around creatures that big, living wild and thriving. Since most whales are still protected their number have swelled dramatically, especially the humpbacks. A new problem is that extreme noise pollution in the ocean is making many whales deaf and they are not able to hear large commercial ships coming and many collide with these tankers and are killed.