The Sea Inside

beaked whales, their teeth are not used for feeding; they employ suction to feed on the squid of which they are so inordinately fond. Can there be enough calamari in the sea for these creatures? Hal Whitehead tells me sperm whales eat one hundred million tons of fish and squid each year, more than we humans take out of the oceans. 1
    I fall back in the water, into a flurry of fins and limbs. We’re caught up in a trio of sperm whales, almost squashed in between them. Their big square heads float past mine, eyes and flanks, a confusion of us and them. It takes moments to sort us out – cetacean from human – before the whales dive, leaving my diving partner Drew and me to haul ourselves back on the boat.
    We sit squeakily on the rubbery side of the rib, awaiting our orders. Another blow appears close to our bow. João manoeuvres alongside the animal, slowly closing the distance between us. He tells us to be as quiet as we can. Not for the first time, it occurs to me how odd it is that an animal ten times the size of the craft on which we sit should be so timid of our proximity; as though, like the wheatear, it might be frightened by clouds, which is what we represent
–
a black rubber cloud over the whale’s head.
    My natural reaction in the water, to reach out and pull myself through it, is inappropriate with a wild animal; I might as well be waving my arms in front of a hippopotamus. Drew shows me how to drift back with the boat as we drop in, minimising the disturbance; how to keep my fins below the surface, so as not to create a stream of bubbles – a sign of aggression to a whale.
    Everything is about making our bodies as unintimidating as possible. At barely five foot eight and eight and a half stone, how could I present any peril to an animal with a body mass so many times my own? Yet even before I get in the water, I’m inflicting stress on a creature whose well-being I purport to protect. We are operating under special licence from the Azorean government, but no one has asked the whales.
    The Atlantic surges up to meet me, then sucks me in. The swell is powerful, the blue engulfing. I’m weightless and free. I duck down to avoid Drew’s descending six-foot-something bulk – armed as he is with his underwater camera – and attempt to orientate myself. João told me to look up every so often towards the landmark of the vigia, but that’s not so easy. Our skipper is a stern taskmaster; I feel as if he’s training me on the football field. He shouts instructions at me as I paddle away, in the general direction of whales.
    Through the waves that rock in front of my mask I can see, albeit intermittently, the animal’s head, the plosive blow from its single nostril. The sun turns its skin grey and shiny as it bobs there, rising and falling. Maybe it’s as nervous as I am. It’s not easy to maintain your balance when the sea is swaying you from side to side as if you were a goldfish in a bowl being carried in a pair of unsteady hands.
    Above is normality; below, everything is different. It continually surprises me, during these days with the whales, how invisible they are; like birds that vanish in mid-air, they seem to disappear in the sea. It’s an impossible feat of prestidigitation. Over the waves I can see the whale, quite clearly close; under the water, nothing. Then suddenly there it is – a great big beautiful animal held in the surf, stilled within the surge as I am flailing.
    To find oneself hovering over a whale’s flukes, caught up in what seems to be slow motion, is truly dreamlike, because it relates to nothing that could possibly happen on land. I’m walled in by whale and water, yet at the same time entirely open to what is around me. Nothing else matters. I feel nothing bad can happen if I’m with a whale. As if its grey mass insures against all the other evils. And I feel that because I am aware, in my head, of the power of its brain as well as its body.
    It’s stupid to be scared in such a luminous place. Their world is bright even when ours is overcast. As the clouds slide off the volcano’s slopes and into the sea, the conditions seem as uninviting as the sky, the water slate-grey, and three miles deep. But as I dive again, on the third day, it seems that a bank of lights is switched on. What appears dull from above is a floodlit field below. The sea’s surface acts as a lens, both filtering and focusing the sun’s rays. Under the ocean’s sky, the whales’ blue world