SWIMMING WITH THE WHALES

by Warren Miller

I was hard at work yesterday, taking my mid-morning nap, when the phone rang.

It was my neighbor Elmo who said, "The Orcas are coming."

My wife Laurie, our houseguest Marilyn, and I, with my camera, piled into our 1977 powerboat and set out to get a good photo of the whales, with our house in the background as they passed by.

By the time the pod of Orcas approached the channel in front of our house, there were 37 different boats watching them. Nineteen of them were tour boats with from ten to a hundred gawking tourists aboard, most of them with a video camera. Each one had paid $50.00 or more to spend a couple of hours watching the Orcas come up for air every few minutes.

Last year when I followed the whales this same way, I spent so much time doing it that I finally had to get away because I developed such an uncontrollable urge to dive in and swim with them.

As I jockeyed my small boat for a good photo position, a 95-foot, fifteen-foot high cruise boat with 71 video camera operators on board came between our small boat and my house so I didn't get the picture I wanted. As I silently swore at the tour boat operator, I thought back to my first experience with Orcas.

In 1965, I got a phone call from my friend Jim Griffin in Seattle, who told me, "My brother Ted has just captured an Orca up in British Columbia. He's going to build a steel cage around it and tow the cage with the whale down to the pier alongside of Ivar's Fish House. Would you be interested in flying up and filming the whole operation?"

I struck a deal with him to supply the cameraman and film; he would pay for half of the airplane ticket and the cameraman's expenses, and I would pay the other half. We would own the footage together.

On the way to the airport, I told my photographer, Don Brolin, not to take any chances just because I had bought him a one-way ticket to Seattle.

Here is his story.

How do you film a captured whale while they are welding a steel cage around him? It was raining most of the time, the whale was black, the water was almost black, and there wasn't a whole lot to see. Welding the various sections of the cage together only took a few days and then the slow journey began. There was nothing to take movies of, but a few fifty-gallon drums being towed slowly through the water with a whale occasionally spouting in between them.

To keep his prize alive, Ted Griffin was buying salmon from any fishing boat that happened by. Over the next couple of days, Ted developed a pattern of feeding so that they could kind of figure out where "Namu" the Orca was going to swim and how long it would take to get there.

The whole contraption - fifty-gallon drums, welded, steel rebar cage, towline to the tug, and the tug itself - was making about two or three mph though the darkness of the Canadian waters. Everyone on board was hoping that the wind wouldn't start blowing and break up the cage.

This was many years ago when Orcas were still thought of as killer whales that ate people for lunch. To the best of my knowledge, no one had ever been swimming with them before.

Don eased himself cautiously down inside the steel rebar cage. When he was about fifteen feet down, a dead salmon floated down in front of him. as it passed by, so did "Namu" and, as Don described it, "Namu looked like a big black Greyhound Bus with an opening in the front as big as a eight-passenger hot tub. "

That twenty-pound salmon just disappeared.

Don tried to squeeze out through the holes in the steel cage, but couldn't fit. Rather than move and attract the Orca's attention, he just hung on, holding his breath as it again swam back the other way. Thirty seconds or so later, it swam back by and, as it did, it looked Don right in the eye.

Namu didn't even bother to slow down so, three laps later, Don went back to the surface and called for his waterproof camera.

The pictures turned out pretty much as he described them. The Orca looked like a black Greyhound Bus driving down a dark narrow alley, with an open front end that looked about as big as an eight-passenger hot tub.

We eventually sold the footage to a TV show and the Orca died a couple of years later from eating too many beer cans and Coca Cola bottles while it was in a cage alongside Ivars's Fish House wharf in Seattle.

Yesterday afternoon, as I sat silently in my boat with the engine off and watched seventeen Orcas swim by, I again wanted to dive in and swim along with them. Ecological awareness has to start somewhere and maybe Namu, the first-ever captured Orca, might have been the starting point for the respect people now have for this magnificent, air-breathing fish.