For an interactive series images from my close encounter with a humpback whale, click here: Humpback whale surfaces under Flying Fish

The first time I heard the song of a humpback whale I was at anchor on a moonless night in the shelter of Eukafa Island in Tonga. I had been sleeping and the sound seemed to emanate from a dream. Then, with open eyes, I realized that the long, sonorous aria was coming from the ocean and resonating through the fiberglass hull of Flying Fish. The sound was longing and lonely and seductive. The life force in this whale song called out: I am here, where are you?

Both male and female humpback whales vocalize, but only males produce the complex song of wails, moans, and shrieks that is so identifiable of this species. Humpback songs are repeated in cycles lasting up to 30 minutes and individual whales may sing continuously for more than 24 hours. Each population of humpbacks collectively sings a unique song, one they have learned from other whales.

“The traditional explanation for why whales do this is that male whales are singing to seduce female whales, and that females get really turned on by songs that are currently in style,” said cognitive neuroscientist Eduardo Mercado III in a recent edition of LiveScience.

To the casual human listener, the love song of a humpback whale sounds magnificently free-flowing and improvised. But fresh mathematical analysis by some bioacousticians has found that there are complex grammatical rules used in whale songs. Using syntax, the whales combine sounds into phrases, which they further weave into hours-long melodies packed with information. Whales have even been found to sing in dialect, according to a study in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. Although researchers say that while these songs don’t meet the linguistic rigor necessary for a true language, there is evidence that whales use a hierarchical structure of communication similar to human beings.

Most animals use sight and smell to communicate, but these senses are limited in the ocean. Whales rely on sound, which travels four times faster in water than in air. Whale songs are thought to have an important role in mate selection as males sing for attention and to establish dominance.

Courtship rituals take place in the warm waters of Tonga and competition for a mate can be fierce. Males sometimes gather into competitive groups around a female and fight for the right to mate with her. Male humpbacks can be seen breaching, tail slapping, and charging during courtship. Ultimately, however, the female calls the shots. Polyandry has been observed in humpback whales, with females known to have multiple male partners throughout their lifespan.

Once hunted to the brink of extinction, the humpback whale population fell by an estimated 90% before a 1966 moratorium on killing them went into effect. The population has since rebounded to about 80,000 worldwide. Cultural attention to whale vocalization intensified after a 1970s paper published in Science magazine by biologists Roger Payne and Scott McVay describing “surprisingly beautiful sounds” made by humpback whales. Analyzing underwater recordings they found that these whale sounds were intricately repetitive. “We call the fixed patterns of humpback sounds ‘songs,’” they wrote. Soon thereafter, the hit album Songs of the Humpback Whale was released and the recording went multi-platinum.

After hearing my first whale song through the hull of Flying Fish, it was impossible to return to sleep. I went on deck squinting into the darkness hoping to see the whale. I saw nothing move in the calm water. Strangely, I could no longer hear the song, either. It was only when I went below that the song echoed again through the cabin. The area of the hull below the surface of the water functioned as a hydrophone. Somewhere out there a whale was looking for love.

 

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A pretty English girl is sipping a fruit drink at a beach resort when I wade up out of the ocean like the lizard man in the Creature from the Black Lagoon.

“Hi!” I say, as I pull up a barstool next to her, certain that she will be delighted to spend some time with a fascinating person like me.

She jumps off her barstool, tipping it over in alarm, and says, “Have you gone troppo?”

This is the first time I have heard the expression–gone troppo–which means, according the Outback Dictionary, that the person it refers to has “succumbed to a state of tropical madness; to have lost the veneer of civilization after spending too much time in the tropics.”

How could the English girl have thought this about me? After more than a week of sitting out a low pressure system at anchor aboard Flying Fish, I was eager to get off the boat and interact with other living human beings. That I hadn’t washed, shaved, brushed my teeth, or changed my clothes in longer than I could remember didn’t seem to me like it should have been a problem. Had I really “lost the veneer of civilization?” I never even knew I had it.

Bad weather on a boat is a perfect petri dish for ennui. It’s not that the weather was dangerous, although there was continuous rain and the wind was blowing a steady 30 knots with gusts to 35. I had two good anchors down on the leeward side of Lifuka in the Ha’apai Islands of Tonga. Hatches and portholes were leaking from the rain. It felt like water torture as drops of rain dripped onto my forehead. I could almost see the mold growing on the inside of the cabin. I love my boat but the walls were closing in.

Sensing my unwelcome at the resort bar, I set off on foot through the bush across the island of Lifuka. Rain or no, it feels good to move my legs. I imagine myself as the character Pig-Pen in the comic strip Peanuts by Charles Schulz, leaving a trail of dirt in my wake. Walking is liberating.

The Kingdom of Tonga is known as The Friendly Islands, given the name by explorer Capt. James Cook in 1773, who was apparently unaware of a well-developed plot by a Tongan chief named Finau intended to kill Cook and seize his ships. Upon his arrival, the Tongans had welcomed Cook with gifts of fruit, pigs, turtles, and extravagant hospitality.

I think about this as the road I walk turns into a track and then ultimately into a footpath. Despite my appearance, the Tongans I encounter on my walkabout receive me with enthusiasm, and in english.

“Where are you going?” asks a man feeding his pigs, without the preamble of a greeting.

I am walking to see your island, I answer, and to get some exercise.

“Why?” is his reply.

An elderly woman tending an open fire rendering coconut oil in a charred iron caldron asks, “Where is your wife?”

The question catches me off guard. She is where she wants to be, I say.

This does not translate so I answer more directly. She is working, I say. And this response further complicates the conversation.

“Why is she working and you are walking in the bush on Lifuka?”

What might seem like random banter with the coconut oil woman is insightful to me on many levels. I have always appreciated direct communication and in Tonga directness is a conversational precept. Tongans see into a person and discard their evasiveness. The woman pulls three bananas off a stalk and hands me a green drinking coconut. She says, “You are hungry and thirsty.”

Further along the footpath, two boys emerge from a trash heap of junk food wrappers and empty beer cans that litter a grove of banana trees and taro plants.

Hello, I say. Mālō e lelei.

“Give me money,” the larger of the two boys says in english. He is maybe 10 years old. He is menacing and holds a homemade slingshot.

Why? I ask. Why should I give you money? I can see that the boy understands my question but he cannot not answer it.

“I want money,” he repeats. And then his younger companion chimes in, “‘Io, gimme money, too.”

I turn away and continue walking. Then I see the boy’s hand raise with the slingshot. He has a piece of coral rock wedged between the rubber bands. I whirl around and take a step toward him. The boys flee down the trail. As they disappear into the trees I hear one call out, “Pālangi!” 

The encounter with the boys is disturbing but the word Pālangi is not necessarily an invective. Cook speculated that the word translated to “cloth men” or foreigners who arrived in boats with sails. Earlier etymologies link Pālangi to the expression, “People from the Sky.” But, the boys wanting money delivered this word with venom. In their usage, Pālangi described a foreigner as a “white pig.”

As a stranger in a strange land, I must constantly remind myself to walk softly in these beautiful and unfamiliar places. I straddle a world where on one side of an island there is a beach resort and on the other side of the island hard-scrabble families struggle for their daily bread. This, too, is part of my voyage of self discovery.

It is time for me to return to Flying Fish for a shower, a shave, and a clean change of clothing–and to remember who I am.

 

There he, sitting in the moonlight
Not found, livin no city
He smile, mucho in a sunshine
High life, counting de fruit bat

Troppo, gone troppo, troppo
It’s time you know I gone troppo

—Troppo by George Harrison 1982

 

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It is not seasickness that ails me. I love the rhythm of this sailboat. And, I am not sick of the sea. I cannot imagine a more beautiful place to be than on the ocean aboard Flying Fish.

If I were onshore it would be just a routine illness, the kind that we all get from time to time, maybe more severe than usual–bronchitis, high fever, vomiting, diarrhea, and a blinding headache for hours on end. (If this is “too much information” it won’t hurt my feelings if you click off now, however, this bout of the flu or whatever it was, is relevant to the narrative of the voyage of Flying Fish.)

Onshore there are doctors and medications immediately at hand. You call in sick at work for a few days. No drama. On a sailboat, in a remote part of the world, it becomes an entirely different issue.

This 72 hours of delirium hit me like an unforecasted cyclone. I had been preparing for a departure from Neiafu, Tonga the following day. Fortunately, I was still at anchor when the illness immobilized me. I was awaken at midnight by a volcanic eruption of nasuea and night sweats. I could not even sit upright in my berth. If I had been underway navigating the reefs of Vava’u or the Ha’api islands, as I had intended, there might have been serious consequences.

Flying Fish is a thoroughbred of a sailboat. At nearly 49 feet and 16 tons this boat takes my undivided attention to keep the keel moving straight and level. She is a handful to sail alone but I am up to the task. I am not a young man any more but when I am sailing this boat I feel half my age. In nearly 10,000 miles under sail aboard Flying Fish, in all weather conditions, I have felt completely confident in my abilities to sail her singlehandedly. But, until now, I had not been sick like this onboard. This was a game-changer.

By morning, my lungs were seriously congested. It was difficult to breath. The vomiting had forced me to place a Home Depot bucket at the side of my berth. I was sweating and then freezing between convulsive waves of nausea. I stared at the ceiling of my cabin and thanked God that I was not under sail.

This is the first moment in the voyage of Flying Fish when doubt of my ability to sail long distances alone has entered my mind. Before I left the dock in Key West eight months ago, I had carefully prepared for potential accidents at sea. It was part of my risk mitigation. A neurosurgeon friend even gave me a surgical staple gun as a bon voyage gift, and a hands-on a demonstration of how to use it, if necessary. But I never considered the more mundane possibilities of just being physically sick at a time when I needed to be at my peak mental and physical capabilities.

After two days on my back, with the cabin of Flying Fish a horror show of sweat-soaked sheets, spilled bottles of over-the-counter medications, and an overflowing bucket, I finally addressed my options. There is a clinic on the island of Vava’u but at least three sailors I have spoken with who were recently attended there have contracted serious staph infections. That was not a good option to me. I almost made an “assistance needed” VHF radio called to other yachts in the area that might be listening. That would have been the prudent thing to do but I let my pride get in the way of feeling better. Being solo on Flying Fish–a big, conspicuous boat–puts out the message, “Hey, I’m tough enough to sail across oceans alone. I don’t need anyone’s help.” How wimpy would it look now to get on the radio to say, “I don’t feel very good. Can someone please bring me some chicken soup?” The irony is that nearly every boat in radio range would have responded. Cruising sailors look out for each other. It doesn’t have to be just life and death situations.

On the morning of the third day the illness was over. As I cleaned my body and boat I began to feel somewhat chagrined. Had I overdramatized a bad case of the flu? I don’t know; I’m a sailor not a doctor. At what point do severely congested lungs become pneumonic? Or a coral cut becomes a staph infection? In 1888, Robert Louis Stevenson sailed to the South Pacific on the yacht Casco, “to be far from any hand of help.” He had struggled with tuberculosis for years and had hoped the tropical sea air might heal his lungs. Four years later he was dead in Samoa at age 44.

Thus far along my journey, I have focused the risk mitigation on avoiding reefs and storms, but this little health event reminded me that I need to pay attention to the health and well-being of the pilot of Flying Fish, too. When I set sail from Key West with such ambitious plans I wanted a challenge without a lifeline. I didn’t want it all to be easy and comfortable. Now, I realize I need to learn about the physiological part of sailing alone, too. Being sick at anchor is far less serious than being sick under sail but in an odd way it has given some perspective and balance to my passage aboard Flying Fish.

I could have taken a lesson from one of my maritime heroes, Joshua Slocum, who as most sailors know was, in 1898, the first person to sail alone around the world. On his Atlantic crossing he had just left the island of Faial in the Azores and he made a supper of cheese and plums he had been given as gifts. Within hours he was on his back on the cabin floor writhing with cramps and delirious with fever. At one point he looked out of the companionway doors to see an ethereal figure at the helm steering the Spray. The figure looked at Slocum and said, “I am one of Columbus’s crew. I am the pilot of the Pinta come to aid you. Lie quiet, señor captain, and I will guide your ship tonight.”

Guardian angels manifest themselves in many ways. May all of those who sail alone have an angel looking out for them, especially when we are sick at sea.

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The Unique Fauna of Tonga

Each landfall in Flying Fish presents new fascination and wonder. Every island offers distinctive culture, unique geology, and an idiosyncratic diversity of nature. The Kingdom of Tonga is no exception.

Flying Fish is anchored close to a shoreline in the island group of Vava’u. Growing at the high water mark is a Tropical almond tree that provides a roost for a colony of bats. These are big bats. Think of a small dog with black leathery wings. And yes, they do have teeth, fangs actually. And no, they are not vampire bats, there are no puncture wounds on my neck (yet). Still, I would not be happy to wake up in the middle of dark night to find a bat the size of a poodle fluttering around inside the cabin of Flying Fish.

These bats are known as flying foxes (Pteropus tonganus). They are the only mammals that can fly. The bats are thriving in Tonga but their numbers have declined on other Pacific islands. Some species of fruit bats in Samoa and Fiji have become extinct because of overhunting. Flying foxes are considered a culinary delicacy in the South Pacific. In the Kingdom of Tonga, however, they are considered sacred. Nobody is allowed to hunt them except, of course, the King of Tonga. There is an expression here–Fakatonga–translated it means, it’s the Tongan way of doing things.

In my anchorage there are several dozen bats hanging upside-down in the almond tree. They are a generally passive group with continual chittering and readjustment of their claws upon the branches of their roosts. Occasionally, one will drop from a branch, take flight, and disappear into the crown of a nearby mango tree. When the fruit is ripe, the bats masticate the pulp and spit out an “ejecta pellet” (a wad) of fiber. Contented, the males then scent-mark sections of a tree branch to attract females to land within their territory.

I look up to a sudden commotion on one branch. Two bats bare their teeth and wrap their wings around each other, squealing, as they begin a ferocious struggle. Amid the screeching and tumult there is a whirling ball of wings and fur, yet somehow the bats manage to stay attached to the branch. The melee causes other bats in the vicinity to wrap their cloaks tightly around their heads, as if they cannot bear to look at what happens next. It seems as if the combatants are in a battle to the death.

But then… Oh!

It turns out that they are not actually fighting at all. It’s bat sex. Procreation. The two bats re-emerge from their amorous scrum and then immediately look in opposite directions and ignore each other. It is the way things are done here. Fakatonga!

Underwater, the life in Tonga is equally fascinating. The reef and coral is vibrant and alive, despite evidence of an invasive predator that is multiplying here as in many other tropical South Pacific habitats.

This beautiful creature is called the Crown of Thorns starfish, and it has an insatiable appetite for coral. A Crown of Thorns starfish is capable of eating six square meters of live coral in a single year. The size of this starfish can be massive with a diameter that measures up to three feet projecting 23 individual coral-eating arms. It’s spines will not only puncture a wet suit but they are also laced with a toxin that can cause vomiting, nausea, and severe pain.

I first began seeing Crown of Thorns starfish on the pristine reefs of French Polynesia. In the nearshore waters off the Cook Islands, where much of the reef is dying or already dead, these starfish were feeding on the last of the live coral polyps. In Australia, The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority has joined in the culling efforts of Crown of Thorns there. The problem is so severe that in February volunteer divers removed nearly 47,000 of these starfish from the southern Great Barrier Reef in just seven days.

Research has shown that the outbreaks of Crown of Thorns are related to many of the same issues occurring in all oceans worldwide: increasing water temperatures, spikes in nutrients caused by costal and agricultural runoff, overfishing of natural predators. While the problem is not nearly as severe in Tonga as it is in other areas of the Pacific, the threat to these reefs is real. Crown of Thorns starfish have the ability to move at a speed of 20 meters an hour and one female can produce up to 65 million eggs during a single season.

And so what do big bats and bad starfish in Tonga have to do with each other?

Nothing. And Everything.

Creatures like these in places like this remind me why I am here, alone on a sailboat, a long way from home. The voyage of Flying Fish is taking me to places where every sight, and scent, and touch seems fresh and new. Some things are beautiful. Others are destructive and even frightening. It is all life as I have never seen it before. I am experiencing the wonder of a natural world more complex than I could ever imagine.

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