20. Dolphins, Whales
It’s so stereotypical, but for me, too, the most memorable marine animals from my trans-Atlantic crossing were the dolphins. Although I saw a few different species, I regularly encountered what I believed to have been the short-beaked common dolphin (Delphinus delphis). I worked this one out because the guide that I had aboard Fox had lots of easy color pictures. Dolphins appeared throughout my passage and often at my worst times. In big seas and winds, if Neptune was mischievous, he timed a wave just as I was coming out of the hatch. I did not have a canvas or rigid shelter over the cockpit, called a dodger in America, which many boats have to shield some of the weather. So not only might a tall wave slosh a saltwater smack across my face, but if I didn’t have everything shut in time, I’d get water in the cabin, adding to the general mank below that I tried to control by wiping and cleaning daily.
At one low point in the voyage, after a long night of winds over thirty knots, the sea and sky different shades of slate, I was stepping out of the companionway when Fox slid off a wave and I heard a bang on the hull by another wave coming from a different angle. Before I got out of the way, seawater splashed down my collar and sprayed a barrel’s worth of ocean into the cabin across the electronics. I turned out to the gale and swore, blasphemed at my greatest volume, right out of my belly. At that instant a pod of dolphins approached from windward, as if my shouting had summoned them. One of the dolphins was escorting a baby about the size of a raccoon. I found myself apologizing for the profanity. The family leaped in unison, swam under the boat, appeared to be smiling, not mocking, as if reminding me to try to relax and enjoy the ride.
Dolphins were there for my high points of the voyage, too. When the stars were out and conditions were reasonable, sailing alone at night by myself was glorious. Over the course of my passage in July and August, I observed an entire cycle of the moon and progressed along a celestial march of time. The days were getting shorter toward the autumnal equinox, while I sailed eastward toward the rising sun and across time zones. In the middle of the North Atlantic, ship traffic was practically nonexistent for me that summer, and since I kept my radar and running lights off to conserve power there was not a light from my boat or from anywhere as far as I could see. As I worked on my star identification with my books on board, I traced the movements of constellations and planets and embraced that gorgeous verse written by the seventeenth-century English poet and priest Thomas Traherne: “You never enjoy the world aright, till the Sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars: and perceive yourself to be the sole heir of the whole world.”
One evening I had spent more than an hour altering the boat’s course, then adjusting the sails and various lines. I did not have roller furling on my boat, which meant I had to crawl up forward on the bow to put up and take down sails. The wind was light that evening, but the boat was still moving in a favorable direction. I was disappointed in myself, though, in how long it took me to try to get Fox performing the way I wanted. Exhausted, I decided to go below for a short nap.
Just as I was about to climb down below, I heard a short ffuh off the bow: the exhale of a dolphin. I clipped my tether back into the jackline and walked up to the bow. I laid myself on the white deck like a child leaning over the edge of the bed. I could have reached out and touched them: five dolphins swimming and swerving in front of Fox, their bodies weaving wide, pale, green-blue wakes of bioluminescence. Through the dark it was too fuzzy to see underwater their fins, tails, or the full shapes of their heads. I could only see their surging outlines, perfectly in sync, somehow never bumping into each other or the bow, always knowing exactly how the other was going to angle, effortlessly swimming at the same speed, then circling back to match my slower progress. Occasionally a black back eased up through the sea’s surface for another exhale, dripping water that glowed with green gems of bioluminescence while the wet skin wore the stars of the universe.
It was about 3:30 a.m. local time. In between watching the dolphins I rolled over and looked back at Fox, Sandy sailing the boat so quietly on his own, with me as passenger. Gazing upwards I saw the mast and mainsail rocking between the stars Deneb and Vega. I imagined the Earth and its rotation, a mile of black sea beneath me, and I thought about various people all over the world doing different things at that moment: many suffering, longing for something, some sleeping, a rare few blessed and blissful and as free as me at that instant. I tried without success to envision someone living something even nearly as beautiful. How could anyone be as privileged as me in that instant? The entire adventure was worth it for that one night, that one half-hour on the bow with the dolphins.
Just as most Western sailors throughout history seem to have always feared and hated sharks, these same sailors have seemed to have found joy in watching dolphins, perhaps because of their smile-like mouth, their dynamic swimming around boats, and because, well, their teeth are a lot smaller. Sailors in Slocum’s day were quite content to enjoy dolphins leaping, celebrating them as good omens, and then kill the same animals for dinner. Yet by the mid-twentieth century, harpooning dolphins for food or souvenirs largely faded from the broader culture of both working mariners and recreational sailors in the West due to increased understanding of our mammalian connections, further studies into their intelligence, as well as popular depictions in stories and film, such as the television series Flipper (1964–7). Dolphins and whales in the 1970s and 1980s became the poster animals for ocean conservation and endangered species, just as polar bears are often the icon for climate-change organizations today.
Slocum not only wrote of how ocean dolphins favored sailing vessels over steamships, but he said they leaped out of the water when he sang sea chanteys in the North Atlantic, “vastly far more appreciative than the turtles.” Slocum thought of dolphins as fish, but if he ever tried to harpoon them, as he did sea turtles and sharks, he never mentioned this in Sailing Alone Around the World. Slocum instead described dolphins as “gamboling” companions to Spray. (Dolphins seem always to be gamboling in written works since at least the early 1800s.) Off the Azores, Slocum explained that dolphins were “gamboling all about” his boat, but the animals avoided the steamship Olympia which had powered near the Spray with a young captain far too confident in his navigation. “Porpoises always prefer sailing-ships,” Slocum explained.
In the 1920s, Pidgeon’s dolphins were “gamboling,” too, seemingly “for the joy of it.” He regularly observed schools during one of his long runs in the South Pacific. He began to distinguish individuals by their “peculiar markings or scars.” In 1950, Edward Allcard’s dolphins were still “gamboling,” rushing toward his boat and leaping out of the water, “bent on getting the maximum enjoyment out of life.”
In the late 1960s, dolphins kept up the mood of teenager Robin Lee Graham, the same sailor who shot sharks on sight. The first pod of dolphins that Graham saw was near Hawai‘i. He could hear their squeaking on the surface and through his fiberglass hull underwater, especially after one thumped into the keel. The next day they were again swimming alongside. Speaking into his tape recorder, he said: “It has been so long since I heard any voice, and it’s almost as though someone was trying to answer me.” Leaving his anchorage in American Samoa, and then later out of Darwin, Australia, Graham wrote that dolphins seemed to be welcoming him back to the sea. When he met and fell in love with his future wife, Patti, she reminded him of a dolphin when she swam. When the two walked naked on the beach in the Galápagos, Patti now five months pregnant, Graham wrote that the dolphins came up to the shore “and sort of tilted their heads sideways to take a look.” He expands from here to talk about their Garden of Eden, the prolific wildlife, and the dolphins’ lack of fear of humans: “they sort of accept us.”
Dolphins have kept on playing happy protective roles in single-handed sailor stories. It happens so often, dolphins arriving at the right time to welcome or encourage, that it cannot always be a coincidence. On Neal Petersen’s first ocean passage up to Ireland, dolphins appeared just at the moment when he was beginning to believe his naysayers, the “critics at the yacht club.” He had lost his rudder, had no wind, was low on drinking water, and he knew he would have no money to repair anything when he got ashore. This was when the dolphins came leaping, flipping, “dancing on their tails” along both sides of his boat: “As if to lift my spirits, Nature answered on cue.”
The most extraordinary sea story about ocean dolphins that I’ve heard or read was told by Moitessier. It’s noteworthy that among the books he said he was reading on board was Robert Merle’s The Day of the Dolphin (1967), a science-fiction novel about dolphin intelligence and a biologist based on John Lilly, the researcher who explored single-handed sailor narratives and, more famously, studied LSD, water immersion, and dolphin-human communication. Moitessier and Joshua were nearing Rakiura Stewart Island, at the southern tip of Aotearoa New Zealand. He knew that submerged rocky shoals extended far out beyond the island. Although it was mostly overcast, he managed a sun sight. Confident as to where he was, he continued sailing swiftly at over seven knots with a steady favorable breeze, making sure to give the shoals a wide berth. Once past this point he would be truly eastbound in the South Pacific, able to pop some champagne and free from worrying about any more land for thousands of miles.
The sky filled with clouds, but the waves remained small. The wind held as he sped along, eager to pass this last hazard. When he was down below drinking coffee and looking at the chart, he heard the “familiar whistlings,” so he poked his head out of the hatch and saw a rush of over one hundred dolphins schooling around his boat. By his description, geography, and their behavior, these were likely dusky dolphins (Lagenorhynchus obscurus), which have very small beaks, black backs, and white bellies. They acted in a way he had never seen any dolphins behave before.
Moitessier wrote: “A tight line of 25 dolphins swimming abreast goes from stern to stem [bow] on the starboard side, in three breaths, then the whole group veers right and rushes off at right angles, all the fins cutting the water together and in the same breath taken on the fly.”
Moitessier watched them repeat this behavior over and over. He sensed that they were agitated, “nervous.” Normal dolphin behavior would be to swim on both sides of his boat or play in his bow wake, especially since he was sailing so well and quickly. But this time, among the huge school a smaller group swam alongside his boat then sharply turned right, to starboard. The dolphins repeated this group turn about ten times. Moitessier decided to look at his compass. The wind had shifted roughly ninety degrees. With the calm waters and the disorienting overcast skies, he hadn’t noticed that Joshua had turned itself northerly and was heading toward the submerged reef, the jagged edges that would have ended his trip, if not his life in these cold seas.
Moitessier turned right to follow the dolphins, adjusting his sails and the self-steering gear to a new safer course. The dolphins stopped their veering behavior. The entire school stuck around, though mostly on the starboard side of his boat. One of them leaped out of the water three times, spinning in the air. Moitessier could not help interpret this to mean that the dolphin was celebrating their communication and cheering him on. Although he was tempted to steer back to the left again toward the rocks, just to see what would happen, he wrote that he was afraid to ask for too much, to probe his fairy tale too hard.
Teenaged single-hander Laura Dekker watches dolphins from the bow of her boat Guppy en route to the Galápagos Islands (2011).
“I can’t risk spoiling what they have already given me.”
The dolphins continued beside him, seemed to look up at him, and they kept playing around Joshua for about two more hours—longer than he had ever been surrounded by dolphins in all his years at sea. Even when the group left, two stayed with him, one dolphin on each side of the bow, “two fairies in the waning light,” for another three or so hours, through twilight, until after he and Joshua had cleared the shoals.
When it comes to whales—by which I mean the larger toothed whales like orcas (killer whales), pilot whales, and sperm whales, and the large baleen whales like humpbacks and blue whales—solo sailors tend to have more conflicted perceptions. The sheer size of whales is magnificent and awe-inspiring, but for vulnerable sailors by themselves whales also represent a genuine threat to their safety.
Teddy Seymour, for example, had an encounter with an orca that could have sunk his boat. Sailing alone in Love Song in 1986, he was cruising across the Gulf of Aden, bound for the Suez Canal. Seymour was using his Aries self-steering system with its separate rudder suspended off the stern, about two feet under the water. He had passed through a region of light winds and was making good time, sailing safely and calmly. All was going well. Earlier that day he had seen an orca, which is easy to identify at sea because of its black skin, distinctive white patches, and tall thin dorsal fin, which for males can jut out of the water as tall as a person, like a giant witch’s hat slicing through the waves.
After dark, the same orca, or maybe another one, approached his boat.
“A mischief maker pushed Love Song sideways,” Seymour wrote, “and made teeth marks in the Aries rudder. By the time I leaped to the cockpit, the rudder was being molested as the boat continued to be pushed and slightly tilted.”
Seymour did not give an estimate of the killer whale’s length, but orcas can grow as long as thirty feet. His boat Love Song was thirty-five feet long.
“As the hull slid off the emerging monster,” Seymour explained, “a part of the mass appeared; then it quietly submerged. Operating the engine and striking the engine with a hammer were two techniques used for the next half hour to deter foul play.”
Orcas, like all toothed whales, are highly tuned to hearing underwater: sound and echolocation are their primary methods for hunting and social communication. Seymour must have read or heard somewhere that engine noises deter killer whales and reduce their ability to talk to each other and to find food. In the 1980s, the branch of marine biology that studied whale echolocation and their sensitivity to underwater sound had only just begun to emerge.
Seymour concluded his account with some humor:
Explanations submitted to account for this obnoxious behavior suggest both innocence and violence. Was the nudging an act of passion? Could it have been love at first sight? Were the teeth marks a display of affection to be viewed as a memoir? Perhaps the light-grey colored Aries rudder flashing side-to-side in the phosphorescent matter of the sea lured the animal into regarding the device as an evening snack. For the same reason that a patent log rotor is painted black; namely, shark avoidance, I accepted this incident as a suggestion to paint the Aries rudder a darker color.
Perhaps the pale rudder moving through the bioluminescence might indeed have looked to a hungry killer whale like a fish or a whale’s fin? The rudders of these devices are hardy, made of thick fiberglass, but I suspect if that orca had really wanted to take a full confident chomp, with each tooth longer than your finger, it would have done far more damage.
Nor was Seymour the first or the last sailor to come hull to head with a killer whale. There was a theory that Bill King’s boat, holed off Australia, was not bashed by a great white shark but instead by a killer whale. In 1972 at least three killer whales sank a cruising boat off the Galápagos, setting the Robertson family into their life raft and sailing dinghy for over a month before they were picked up by a fishing vessel.
Single-handed sailors have also had close encounters with a range of other whale species. One September day in 1892, when William Andrews was sailing alone across the North Atlantic and only about a week from landing in Portugal in his 14.5-foot boat, he maneuvered through a pod of what he identified as finbacks. Andrews wrote, perhaps referring to a boat hook of some kind: “I seized my shark tickler, rattled it on the boat, made a noise and yelled at them. All to no avail. On they came, with their mouths wide open and with blow holes big enough to crawl into. I commenced to tremble and feel shaky in the knees. When within fifty feet, oh, how they made the water boil!” The whales made a commotion around his boat—presumably he was in an area where they were feeding. He reported that it lasted a terrifying fifteen minutes, turning his little boat every which way, “they blowing their misty breaths in my face.”
A few years later, in Sailing Alone Around the World, Slocum was in awe of the feeding behavior of whales, likely humpbacks, doing what biologists now refer to as “bubble feeding” in which they corral a school of fish using air bubbles. Slocum experienced the danger of whales, too, when after leaving Juan Fernández off the coast of Chile he and Spray had a near collision with a large whale.
In Slocum’s 1890s, as you might expect, there was little talk about ocean conservation or even much human impact on deep-ocean animal populations, other than the recognition that the whalemen and sealers had impacted and even sometimes decimated local “stocks.” Extinction at the hand of human hunting and loss of habitat was well known on land by then, but although fishermen recognized the reductions of many populations and worried about the impacts of higher-capacity technologies, very few ocean species beyond fur seals and a couple of seabird species, such as the great auk, had actually been identified as extinct or even severely threatened by Western communities. Few if any early single-handed sailors mention loss or reduction of marine populations of any kind during their travels. For example, in Durban, South Africa, Pidgeon anchored his Islander beside three steam whaleships—steel vessels with explosive harpoons that hunted the fast rorqual whales—even as that very year the absolute last of the American wooden whaling ships under sail were limping out of New Bedford, Massachusetts, to try to find any remaining slower-swimming sperm and right whales. Pidgeon ate and socialized with the whalemen in Durban, but he had nothing to say about whale populations or hunting. In fact, over his entire circumnavigation, Pidgeon reported very little interaction with whales themselves, although he once mentioned how surprised he was by the duration of one whale’s breath. Seeing the world as he did, Pidgeon concluded that whales were of little danger to small boats, because they were well aware of their surroundings—as long as you didn’t surprise them.
In the 1940s, sailing much farther south, Vito Dumas often wrote of seeing whales yet almost entirely in terms of danger to his vessel. He reported at least ten close encounters with whales—large baleen whales, sperm whales, and mid-size toothed whales, perhaps pilot whales. His solo transect might be a record of healthier whale populations in the Southern Ocean before the industrial-scale increase of hunting whales there after the war. Sailing as he was during wartime, his language to describe what-he-saw follows in kind. During one calm on the approach to South Australia, with the horizon and sea blending together, Dumas wrote that “the stertorous breathing of the whales sounded like a far-off naval bombardment, punctuated by the splash of projectiles.” At another point a fifty-foot sperm whale, twice the size of his boat, made multiple passes around his Lehg II, as if the whale were examining the vessel and its human inhabitant. On another occasion his boat ended up “elbowing her way between two whales,” and when the wind puffed, his boat rolled on the back of one of the whales before he could sail free. In that case the animal did not react at all, as if soundly asleep. Dumas recorded two other instances of whales directly ahead, including “an enormous cachalot [sperm whale]” that dived just before what would have been a “catastrophe,” and another event when other whales of an unspecified species passed him too close. Dumas tried to scare the whales off by flashing a light or shooting off his gun.
By Davison’s 1950s, the whale at sea was becoming more established as a majestic creature to most Western cultures, although it remained a threat to mariners in small boats. Sailing north in the Caribbean chain up toward the Bahamas, Davison watched a large whale from her cockpit, within a boat length, and she was nervous it might damage Felicity Ann: “At close quarters it was not so much a sea creature as a panorama. My eyes did not take it all in at once, but traveled along it as it ploughed, majestically spouting, across our wake, no more than twenty feet astern.” In 1962 aboard his nineteen-foot Mermaid on the North Pacific, Horie ate canned whale meat brought from home, and he had his own close encounter with what seems by his description to have been a pod of sperm whales, of which he sought to dispel myths about the power of their spout and referred to them as companions, indifferent to his boat.
Perhaps the evolution among single-handers in their thinking about whales is best exemplified by Clare Francis, who sailed alone from England to Newport, Rhode Island, in the 1976 OSTAR and came home to write and publish Woman Alone (1977). Francis wrote often about marine mammals, including a loving portrait at one point of a seal. The trans-Atlantic racers had been asked that year to record their sightings of dolphins and whales, to keep track if possible of any markings and to take photographs. Francis wrote about one day, roughly midway between Ireland and Nova Scotia, when she saw dolphins off the bow, then larger animals astern: “After the number of yachts sunk by killer whales in recent years,” Francis wrote, “I hurried below to get the reference book and flicked through the soggy pages with fumbling haste. But with relief I was able to rule out killer whales or, the worst of all, baby killer whales with angry mothers in hot pursuit. No, these appeared to be pilot whales, which were harmless and, apparently, not too bright because they followed their leader anywhere, even up beaches. I was very flattered that they had chosen to follow me but hoped they would find their leader soon.”
Later that same day, Francis sailed directly toward a larger whale floating still in the water. She wasn’t certain if she should try to steer off. She was paralyzed with indecision. Fortunately the whale at the last moment ducked below, slowly, just as her boat sailed across. Francis expected it to graze her boat’s keel, but felt nothing. The whale had “his radar” on, she wrote.
As Francis neared the Canadian Maritimes, she found herself in a calm with a large whale that she estimated to be about fifty feet swimming alongside. In the moment, she did not think to get her camera but tried to identify it with her book. She could not get enough clues before it sounded. Along the same lines as her fellow English solo sailor a few years earlier, Nicolette Milnes Walker, Francis concluded her thoughts on whales by revealing the emerging environmentalism and nationalistic finger-pointing of the early 1970s: “Whatever the species, it was cheering to have seen a large whale, when the Japanese and the Russians were almost fishing them to extinction.” Clare Francis was reflective of her era here, at the height of Western pressure on whaling nations, which resulted in the international moratorium on commercial whaling that went into effect in 1985.
Many sailors know the story of single-hander Steven Callahan who in 1982 was westbound across the Atlantic when his boat was holed and half-sunk during rough weather by what he believes was a whale, however accidentally. Callahan survived seventy-six grueling days in his life raft, drifting to the Caribbean. During the 1984 OSTAR five different boats collided with whales in the North Atlantic, including one before the starting line. One of the boats had to head back to port and drop out, while another, the Tjisje, took on so much water that it sank. Its solo captain, Henk Van De Weg, was airlifted out of the water by a Coast Guard helicopter. In 2021 more than fifty boats reported close encounters initiated by killer whales off the coast of Portugal and Spain in the Canary Current, half of which resulted in damage that required heading into port for repairs.
In short, however, whales have emerged as conservation icons ashore, whales for the solo sailor remain a mixed experience out at sea, not nearly universally feared like sharks, but not universally adored like dolphins.
For Bill Pinkney, sailing alone out of Boston in the summer of 1990, bound for his circumnavigation and skimming across the recently established National Marine Sanctuary of Stellwagen Bank, a medium-sized whale was the symbol of the deep ocean, finally away from humankind. He observed this pilot whale swimming beside his boat, close enough for him to smell its breath. Pinkney did not see this whale as any kind of threat, but as welcoming him to the ocean, an escort: “I had never been so close to a real wild animal,” he wrote, “and this was such a large and powerful one that I sat in absolute amazement for about fifteen minutes until it disappeared into the sea.” It was a moment that stuck with him for the rest of his life.