Anawak’s close encounter with a humpback whale

Leon Anawak’s close encounter with a humpback whale begins as an ordinary exercise in patience and becomes a scene of uncertain mutual attention. One whale rises almost within reach of his boat; a second appears on the other side. Their fixed gaze makes the encounter feel less like a sighting than an observation directed back at Anawak, but when he tries to photograph them, both sink from view. The encounter ends without an explanation or even a call on his hydrophone, leaving its central question unresolved: what, if anything, did the whales want from him?

From patient watching to sudden proximity

Before the encounter, Anawak watches black humps surface among the waves. He sees blowholes, synchronized puffs of air, backs and dorsal fins, and finally flukes rising as the whales dive. He raises his binoculars in the hope of seeing the undersides, but misses the opportunity. Rather than treat that as a failure, he follows the patience whale-watching requires: there is time before the tourists arrive. He opens another can of iced tea and eats a cereal bar while waiting.

The wait is rewarded when five humps move through the water near his boat. Anawak’s excitement gathers around the expected sight of their flukes; absorbed in the whales, he does not notice the enormous shadow beside him. The change in focus is abrupt. A whale rises vertically from the sea, so close that Anawak jumps, and the other humps vanish from his attention. The encounter shifts from watching a group at a distance to confronting one immense animal at the edge of the boat.

The whale’s gaze

The whale’s head rises almost silently beside the rubber hull. Three and a half metres of its body extend upright from the water; barnacles and knotted bulges cover its drooping mouth, and its eye is as large as a human fist. Anawak has been close to whales before: he has swum beside them, touched them, held on to them, and ridden on them. He also knows that whales may lift their heads beside a Zodiac inflatable boat to inspect it or look for landmarks. Those familiar experiences establish a point of comparison, but do not explain what happens now. This feels different to him.

Anawak cannot tell whether he is looking at the whale or being looked at. The animal appears uninterested in the boat, while its eye remains fixed on him. The scene’s uncertainty is sharpened by the distinction between what he can see and what he can know: he reasons that the humpback’s vision above water should be short-sighted, yet at such close range it may see him as clearly as he sees it. Observation is no longer simply his activity as a researcher. The whale’s attention places him within the encounter as its possible object.

Anawak slowly reaches out so as not to frighten it and strokes its smooth, damp skin. The whale does not dive. Its eye shifts focus slightly, then returns to him. The pause feels intimate to Anawak, but intimacy does not settle the animal’s purpose. He wonders what it gains from remaining upright for so long, especially when a skyhop ordinarily lasts only seconds and takes considerable energy. His knowledge supplies questions, not answers: the animal’s stillness is conspicuous precisely because he knows it is not costless or routine.

A second observer, then absence

A barely audible splash on the far side of the boat interrupts the one-to-one encounter. Anawak turns just in time to see a second head rise from the water. It is smaller than the first but just as close, and it, too, fixes him with a black eye. With two whales holding position around the boat, his uncertainty becomes harder to dismiss as a peculiarity of one animal. Still, the scene gives him no interpretable signal or stated intention. His question about what they want remains unanswered.

Unease creeps in: fixed staring is not normal in Anawak’s experience, and he has never seen anything like it. Even so, he reaches into his bag for his digital camera and raises it toward the whales, asking them to stay still. The act converts an encounter made through gaze and touch into an attempt to record an image. Almost immediately, both heads disappear beneath the surface. The sequence makes the camera seem like a possible mistake, but it does not prove that the whales object to being photographed. Their departure is striking; its cause remains uncertain.

The unanswered trace

Alone again on the sea, Anawak puts the camera away and chooses not to return immediately to the binoculars. He thinks the whales may still be nearby. Instead, he takes out a cassette recorder, puts on headphones, and lowers a hydrophone into the water. The equipment produces crackles, plunks, and a drone, but nothing indicating a whale. He waits for the distinctive call of a humpback; the water remains quiet. The effort to listen extends the encounter beyond the visible moment, yet yields no confirmation of continued contact.

Eventually Anawak hauls in the hydrophone. Later, he sees clouds of spray in the distance, the last sign of the whales. On the way back to Tofino, his thoughts turn to the tourists who might have witnessed the spectacle and to how rapidly news of such an event could spread. He imagines Davie's becoming inundated with bookings if the whales appeared again. That practical thought does not cancel the strangeness of the morning; it sits beside it. For Anawak, the encounter is at once an extraordinary sighting and a potential attraction, while its meaning remains beyond his instruments, his camera, and his experience.