The Sea Inside

out, my density, my temperature, what I am, and what I am not. A dolphin’s sonar, which can fire off two thousand clicks a second, is able to discern something the thickness of a fingernail from thirty feet away. At the last minute the animals swerve aside, under my legs, by my side, past my head.
    Many are having sex. With the males’ two-kilo testes and penises that quick-release from genital slits, and females whose receptivity is advertised by plump flashing bellies, dolphins mate continually. Al says a single female may mate with three different males in five minutes, and will even mate with other species, producing dusky-common dolphin hybrids. As Caspar Henderson observes in his
Book of Barely Imagined Beings
, males will even insert their penises in the shells of turtles or the rear ends of sharks; females have been seen riding piggy-back, with one animal’s dorsal fin in the other’s genital slit.
    Everything is turbulence. The water is alive with clicks, as if a current were being passed through it. I feel the sensual power of their bodies as they race past. But the space between us cannot be closed. Nothing passes in between. There is no connection. As abruptly as they came, they are gone. One dolphin takes two or three last spins around me. Then the waters fall quiet once more.

    Back on the boat, I crouch, shivering on the prow, to watch the super-pod pass by. They’ve fed through the night and are content to play. One dolphin swims below the bow, carrying a piece of seaweed in its beak. M ā ori navigators,
tohunga
, would appeal to dolphins for assistance in a storm: the
tohunga
would pluck a hair from his head and throw it to the
taniwha
or water spirits as a sign of their need for help – a tradition begun after they saw dolphins presenting seaweed as gifts to one another.

    That afternoon, I board another boat on the far side of the Kaikoura Peninsula. The mountains that I’d ignored on my arrival, too close and too big to see, assert themselves from the perspective of the sea, monumental mirrors of the underwater canyon. The animals take on a similar scale. The southern royal albatross, the
toroa
, with its nine-and-a-half-foot wingspan, is, with its wandering cousin, the largest seabird in the world. It is also one of the longest-lived: females have been found still breeding in their sixties. Gliding on enormous wings, one circles the boat, watching us through what Ishmael saw as ‘inexpressible, strange eyes’.
    A blue shark swims by, followed by a pair of blue penguins. Our boat tucks into the gentle swell as we come to a halt, and wait.
    I’m on the upper deck, talking to the crew, when there is a commotion in the water ahead. Without any other warning, the huge blunt head of a sperm whale rises perpendicularly from the waves, with its mouth open. I can clearly see its massive canines. And caught between them is a three-foot-long kingfish.
    Until now I thought that all sperm whales fed deep down; here was a whale eating at the surface. One of the crew points out the traces of the whale’s sonar buzzes – much more powerful than the dolphins’ clicks – creating localised circular patches, as if a ray gun had been trained through the water.
    As the whale reappears, at full length this time, I can judge its bulk; the distance from its cantered nostril to the back of its skull is enough to indicate its size. Compared to the females I’d seen off the Azores, this bull is massive, at least fifty feet long and perhaps forty years old. Three decades ago it left its family, moving south in search of bigger prey, making itself more handsome and huge, and therefore more attractive to a partner. Now it has joined other males, both resident and transitory, to feed on the canyon’s rich resources. There is no ignoring this animal. It is in its prime, regnant and supreme. But here too its kind are diminished, in number if not in size. Those resources may now be dwindling, and there are fewer and fewer sperm whales to watch, for all the frothed defiance of those that remain.
    The whale dives, its flukes against the mountains, angling down into the canyon, all of a scale. Our captain passes me a pair of headphones which would look more at home on the New York subway, and I listen to the loud clicks below us. He smiles as he tells me, ‘We call him Tiaki. It means guardian.’

The silent sea

Look across the beach from the sea, there is
what the mind’s eye sees, romantic, classic,
savage