Sea Turtles, Dolphins, and Whales

Last week, my wife Gloria and I were fortunate to spend six days and five nights on the Pacific coast in Huatulco, Mexico, a town that’s perhaps fifty miles north of the Guatemalan border. Huatulco is comprised of nine bays, four of which have been developed with luxury resorts, condos, and some private residences. The other five bays have been designated by the Mexican government as national park land, protected forever from any development – which is great!

Last Friday, Gloria and I took a four-hour boat tour of the bays. We rented snorkeling equipment and had been assured that there was a beautiful black coral reef in one of the bays. We also hoped that we would be lucky enough to see dolphins and a sea turtle or two. We were very lucky indeed!

Early in the boat trip, we came upon a large flock of seagulls and several pelicans that were engaged in a literal feeding frenzy. Fish were jumping in and out of the water and the gulls – which I’ve always thought of as beautiful and graceful and peaceful – nudged other gulls out of their way in order to get to a fish. The pelicans slowly circled overhead stalking their prey before executing a kamikaze-like dive straight down into the water plunging beneath the surface for a moment or two and then emerging with a fish crushed in their enormous beaks.

A short while later, we saw a sea turtle. Gloria saw it first and pointed it out to Primo, the captain of our boat (Paraiso 1 was it’s name), and he immediately cut the motor and reeled in the two fishing lines that were almost constantly trolling behind us. (More on the fishing lines later.) As we got closer to the sea turtle, we realized that it was two sea turtles! They were mating on the surface of the ocean. An amazing sight.

After the turtles, we proceeded out further into the ocean and it wasn’t very long before we came upon a school of dolphins. I had never before seen dolphins in the wild, in their own habitat, and I can scarcely describe their beauty and grace. There were at least a dozen of them, perhaps more, and I’m almost certain that they were bottlenose dolphins (like Flipper). Two or three abreast, they executed their beautiful arcing leap out of and back into the water over and over again as if they were performing just for us. But what made it so beautiful, so moving, was knowing that they weren’t performing for us – they were being who they are and doing what they always do.

Shortly after our encounter with the school of dolphins, we could see a geyser-like spray of water up into the air in the distance. At first, we thought it was another school of dolphins, but as we got closer we could see that these were much larger creatures: three grey whales, blowing copious amounts of water out of their blowholes. Gloria turned to me and said, “We’re going to need a bigger boat!” (If you haven’t seen “Jaws,” that last phrase will mean nothing to you.) At any rate, here we were about twenty or thirty feet away from three enormous grey whales. Stunning doesn’t begin to describe their majesty. Seeing them was absolutely awe inspiring, and “awe” and “awesome” are words that I generally avoid using given how they’ve been devalued by overuse in contemporary pop culture. A few minutes after we first spotted them, they dove, displaying their magnificent back fin, which I’ve since learned is called a fluke.

Throughout the journey, we also caught six fish - two chulas and four bonitos. The chulas were four to six pounds and the bonitos ranged from eight to perhaps twelve pounds. Gloria reeled in one chula and I reeled in the rest.

We completed our four-hour excursion by snorkeling in the bay that has an extraordinarily beautiful black coral reef. We swam among schools of tropical fish of every color imaginable – yellow, red, blue, orange, chartreuse, and purple, among others. Gloria spotted a sea turtle swimming above the reef and followed her for some time until the turtle decided to swim back out towards the open sea.

In that one day, we were privileged enough to see the turtles, dolphins, and whales, as well as gulls, pelicans, hawks, black eagles, and a few great herons. We saw a stony point that contained a blowhole such that when a large wave crashed onto the shore, a moment later an enormous stream of water would shoot up into the air, geyser-like, before falling back down into the open passage within the rock. It was breathtaking.

And I am filled with gratitude. Namaste.