MAUI - SOLO DOLPHIN ENCOUNTER

After Aihe left Golden Bay, Wade and I searched for her unsuccessfully and Wade invited me to travel to Kaikoura to meet NZ's other solo dolphin at the time - "Maui". I spent a several days in the water getting to know her. I'm still hunting for the rest of my Maui photos. In the meantime, below, you can read about my experiences with orcas. Right: Maui and me having fun in Kaikoura.

I was thinking about a visit to Kaikoura last year when Sam and myself were taken out on a friends boat and ended up in a pod of orcas.

Orca off Kaikoura Peninsula. Cruising along beside an amazing being who looked back into my eye with such awareness, it was hard to say who was really looking at who.

 

Right: Not the best photo but it shows how close it came. The yellow boat in the background is the seal-swim boat. Just after this photo the orca all took off at speed to a commotion in the distance- lunch probably. Man they can move when they want to. I don't think I would have liked to be swimming with seals with a hungry pack of Orca around, could have got very exciting but they were perhaps after stingrays.

 

We as a race need to look to our responsibilities to preserve the wealth of our planet . It will need a huge rethink on our part to see past our greed and the great god dollar and appreciate the diversity that makes the wholeness of life. To kill a highly intelligent creature under the guise of research so it can end up in the fish market is beyond intelligent belief. It has become some sort of game with the whales being the ultimate losers.

While on the Orca subject, I had another encounter years ago with the same intense eye contact. I was at Whatipu beach near Auckland when around the corner came an Orca.... No several orca, mother and child with auntie I assume. I jogged along the beach with them for a while until I was tired.
As I turned back I saw this fin rise up out of the water and keep on rising till well over a metre of dorsal was out of the water, this was one big critter. He tracked along just outside the waves which were very small that day and locked eyes with me. I jogged along never breaking eye contact and finding renewed energy paced this majestic being until my body had enough. Dumb fish.... I don't think so.

Here I will relate a second-hand story:
A friend used to fish out of Tutukaka out as far as the Poor Knights Is., although he only had a 16ft tinnie. One evening in the middle of the wide ocean he was retreiving his gear when he heard a splash in the distance. Thinking dolphin he tapped out a little ditty on his boat as he often did. Another splash closer and louder-"that must be some big dolphin". He carried on retreiving his gear then leaned over the back of the boat to reattach his remotes- to find himself looking straight in the eye of a huge Orca staring straight into his eye just below the surface.

His hand came up and what was normally a two handed operation to start the motor became a one handed panic start. Once the adrenalin had settled he thought about it and realised that he had probably fled from one of the most amazing encounters of his life. If the Orca had wanted him it was no contest but the thing that got him was that it "knew" exactly when and where he was going to look over the back as it was there waiting, staring straight into his eyeball.

Synchronicity? From my experiences I don't think so. There is far more to these cetaceans than meets the eye - pun intended.

 

 

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