He swam underneath me and lifted me out of the water on his flipper
When I was a kid in Pennsylvania, my family rehabilitated wild animals. I grew up with raccoons and a fox running around the house. We would go travelling to Bermuda and I would watch the whales off the shore. I fell in love with them and wanted to know more about what they got up to underwater. Now I’ve been studying whales for more than 30 years and am the president of the Center for Cetacean Research and Conservation, mostly based in the Cook Islands and Bermuda.
In 2017, I was on a boat around Rarotonga in the Cook Islands, working on a film about whale conservation. The crew wanted to get more footage of me in the water with the humpback whales – I often slip in quietly to record their behaviour for research. Seeing a couple of humpbacks in the distance, I slid off the boat wearing a snorkel mask and a GoPro, and swam towards them.
