The Sea Inside

consciousness, and rouse me a few hours later when the birds start to leave before dawn. Too late to sleep, too soon to rise, I give in, lie awake, and listen.
    I realise that each cry is individual (odd how we assume all animals of a species sound the same, as if everyone we knew spoke in an identical intonation). I start to hear how the intervals between each screech change; how they elide the two central notes of their four-note phrase, and how the final squawk goes up in tone. I practise Cory calls in my head, wondering if they’re different from the sounds they make as they come in – ‘Don’t worry, I’m here, I’m home,’ as opposed to ‘See you later, don’t worry, I’ll be back soon.’ Like other nesting seabirds such as the gannet, their mates can recognise each other’s cries over the hubbub, a phenomenon known as ‘the cocktail-party effect’. There is also sexual dimorphism at work, a behavioural difference between the genders: the male’s call is distinctly more ringing in tone, presumably to attract its mate.
    Mulling over these sounds in my head and what they may or may not mean, I drift back to sleep till the sun rises over the volcano and it’s time to go back to sea myself.

    I’d forgotten how uncomfortable it was – the back-breaking, ball-numbing ride as the hull hits the waves with a mighty thwack. I wonder if our skipper enjoys inflicting such pain, but João, who is also a footballer, complains of the effect of his day job on his spine. Every rucking wave means another bone-jarring bump –
pow-pow-pow
– every fall harder for each rise. It’s the price we must pay for our presumption, for daring to enter their domain. I decide that it’s better to stand up, legs astride the padded seat like a cowboy at a rodeo. It works, after a fashion, but I keep checking my teeth to see that they’re still intact.
    As suddenly as it kicked into life, the boat judders to a halt as João cuts off the engines. Over the Tannoy, we hear a quiet voice speaking in Azorean Portuguese. Up on the cliff top, perched on his wooden stool in the Vigia da Queimada, Marcelo André da Silva Soares is calmly directing our movements.
    Marcelo is twenty-four years old, and has lived with whales all his life; his father watched them from the same concrete tower on the headland, directing his fellow hunters. In the transition from hunting to watching, which happened barely a generation ago, Marcelo’s father passed on his knowledge to his son. Now, for ten or twelve hours a day, Marcelo sits quietly in the vigia, peering through powerful binoculars. Behind him is a chart of different species and shapes of cetaceans, resembling the outlines of aeroplanes provided to wartime spotters. From this elevated position, Marcelo’s field of vision can range over two dozen miles across an ocean tilted up to the land like a board on which every movement may be plotted. He is a grandmaster, strategically moving his pieces – the boats – to their targets – the whales.

    Marcelo’s father still works a neighbouring vigia, too. Where his voice is urgent, with the excited stridency of a market trader, his son’s words are whispered, in the hushed tones of a late-night radio DJ. He may be half my age, but Marcelo has already lived another life as a soldier in Kosovo, where other hunters – snipers with deadly rifles – also took their time, and their aim.
    Marcelo directs João towards a whale which has just surfaced. Both men know their part. They know this is a narrow window of opportunity. The whale will stay up for less than ten minutes, as long as it needs to charge its body with oxygen before diving again. And in the time it takes us to get there, the animal promptly does so, leaving only the distant glimpse of its descending flukes and misty blow.
    From behind his plexiglass screen, João unwinds a wire and tosses a hydrophone into the sea. Immediately, we hear clicks over the loudspeaker: the steady, insistent sound of whales in search mode, scanning the water column for squid: a sharp stutter, a pure, clean sound compared to the messy squawk of the shearwaters. It reminds me of the hundreds of bats that skittered over our heads last night, roused from their roosts and employing the same technology.
    A sperm whale’s clicks are the product of a process even more complex than Southampton’s double tides. They’re created by the opening and shutting of a valve set at the front of the animal’s head,