2
Eye-to-Eye with Giants
“The world will show you its secrets if you give it two things it almost never gets:
your full attention, and enough time to change you.”
John Sparks
FIRST LIGHT OVER WALKER BAY
There are mornings when the ocean feels like it is leaning in to listen.
The first day in Hermanus breaks like that.
I step out onto the stoep of the villa just after sunrise, coffee in hand, barefoot on cool stone. The house hangs on the cliff’s edge, the kind of place someone once dreamed up and then had the courage—and the capital—to build. Glass and clean lines and understated luxury. But this morning, all of that is background. The real theatre lies eighty metres away.
The sun is still rising to the left, pushing a soft gold into the bay.
Walker Bay is barely moving.
The water is not flat—not exactly—but its small, slow swells look as if some great hand has smoothed the surface. The sky above is pure September: high, clean, a blue that has not yet decided to turn harsh. A single gull scribbles across it. The air carries that particular mixture I have come to associate with this stretch of coast: fynbos, salt, kelp, and a faint metallic tang that belongs only to deep water.
I lift the binoculars before I even sit down.
I don’t need them to see the first blows.
THE BAY FILLS WITH BREATH
From the villa’s stoep, my world is framed by glass railings and low white walls, but the view is pure wild theatre. To the right, the coastline runs toward the New Harbour, all serrated rock and white water. To the left, the cliffs curve away toward Kwaaiwater and beyond. Directly in front of me, Walker Bay opens like a giant amphitheatre—the stage a few hundred metres wide, the backdrop a slow, indifferent horizon.
Out there, the whales are already at work.
Even with the naked eye, I can count at least ten Southern Right whales scattered across the water. Blows show first—vertical white exclamations against the calm blue. Two blowholes, two jets, a brief, hard‑edged V of steam that hangs for a moment in the still morning air before dissolving. Then backs surface: black, smooth, enormous, rolling up and over in slow arcs. Occasionally a tail lifts, dark and wide, draped in water that streams silver in the light, then disappears with the weighty inevitability of a closing door.
Hermanus likes to call itself the world’s whale‑watching capital. On days like this, it isn’t marketing. It’s geography.
Every year, between about June and November, hundreds of Southern Right whales leave the icy abundance of the Southern Ocean around Antarctica and move north into warmer coastal waters. They come to places like Walker Bay for the same reasons humans seek out warm, safe rooms: to make love, to give birth, to raise the next generation without having to fight for every breath.
They are loyal to their maps. A third of the world’s Southern Right population uses a handful of bays in the southern hemisphere to breed and calve. Walker Bay is one of them. The same whales return, year after year, to the same curves of coast. Some even come back to the very bays where they themselves were conceived—circles within circles, written in salt and memory.
I lower the binoculars and just look.
The bay is full of them.
THREE WHALES, ONE STORY
It takes me a few minutes to notice the three directly in front of me.
The rest are scattered—pairs, trios, solitary animals moving with the ponderous grace of things that have mastered their medium. But about eighty metres out from the villa, slightly to the left, three whales lie close, in an almost suspiciously neat triangle. They are just far enough from the others to feel deliberate.
I raise the binoculars again.
Two are lying nearly parallel, a few body‑lengths apart, pale callosities—their roughened, barnacle‑colonised patches of skin—standing out cream against black. The third moves in a slow arc around them, circling. There is a different quality to their presence. Less drifting, more enquiry.
Something is happening.
I set the coffee down carefully, heart rate already a few beats higher than caffeine alone can explain, and reach for the drone case.
LIFTING INTO THEIR WORLD
The whine of the DJI’s rotors feels almost obscene in the softness of the morning, but the whales pay it no apparent attention. I check the wind—light, perfect—glance once more at the screen, then send the drone out over the water.
From fifty metres up, Walker Bay rearranges itself. The villa, which moments ago felt substantial and central, shrinks to a pale geometry on the cliff edge. The shoreline becomes a ragged scribble of rock and foam. The whales, which from the stoep seemed like ink marks on a flat sea, reveal their full, three‑dimensional selves: forty‑ton bodies suspended in water so clear I can see the paler scars on their backs and the shadows they cast on the kelp beds below.
I ease the drone forward, then into a gentle orbit above the three to the left of the villa. The screen fills with their world.
Two of them are lying side by side now, bellies almost touching, bodies angled slightly toward each other. The third holds position a little ahead and off to one side, turning, watching.
There is no rush. Not even much movement. Just small adjustments—a slow rolling of a flank, a fin lifting a little higher than usual, a turn of the head. But after thousands of hours with these animals, something in the pattern is unmistakable.
Courtship.
THE DANCE BELOW
Through the camera, at 2x zoom, the intimacy is almost unbearable.
The two central whales begin to roll, bellies brushing, callosities clearly visible. Those pale patches, thickened skin colonised by whale lice and barnacles, are their fingerprints—each animal’s pattern unique, recorded by researchers to build life histories that span decades. Some of the whales in Walker Bay are older than I am. Southern Rights can live a hundred years if we let them.
The male eases himself into position with a patience that belies his size. He could, if he wanted, move with enormous force—these are animals that migrated here from Antarctic waters, travelling thousands of kilometres at speeds that would leave most boats behind. But here, in this moment, everything is gentleness.
From above, I watch the choreography unfold.
They surface and submerge in slow synchrony, their bodies tracing overlapping curves in the blue. The male arches slightly, then rolls, tucking himself under the female with a delicacy that is almost human in its care. She adjusts, tilting, presenting the right angle, her tail lifting, then fanning down to create space. The third whale keeps circling, maintaining a respectful proximity, occasionally closing the distance, then easing off again, as if undecided whether to leave or bear witness.
There is a moment when the male’s pectoral fin lifts and then lowers onto the female’s back, resting there like an arm. He holds it for a few seconds—an enormous, pale paddle lying across her darker flank—then lifts it again, water streaming from the trailing edge.
Later, as they surface side by side, their upper jaws meet. From this angle, it looks like a kiss—two massive mouths touching, callosities brushing, a brief contact that, if you were inclined to sentimentality, could pass for affection.
I am inclined.
I’ve watched enough animal behaviour to know projection is a dangerous habit. Whales are not people. They do not live under our narratives of romance and loyalty. And yet: Southern Rights return to the same bays; they recognise individuals; mothers nurse calves for a year in these waters before leading them back south. They endure. They memorise. They remember.
If love has a shape in the ocean, I would not be surprised if it sometimes looks like this.
GIANTS IN CONTEXT
For a few minutes I forget to breathe properly.
I am only camera and eye and the quiet code of the drone under my thumbs. The stoep, the villa, the cliff—all of it falls away. There is only this blue space above three whales, and an awareness that I am being allowed to witness something very few humans ever see this clearly in the wild.
Southern Right whales were once the “right” whales to hunt. Slow‑moving, curious, rich in oil, they floated when dead. Between the 18th and 20th centuries, whalers killed them in their tens of thousands from South Africa to South America, from Australia to New Zealand. By the early 1900s, there were perhaps sixty breeding females left in some populations. Fewer whales than people in a small village.
Protection came in 1937, at least on paper. Only in the late 20th century did the slaughter truly cease. Since then, Southern Rights have climbed slowly back, at roughly seven percent a year in some groups. Today, perhaps 13,000 to 15,000 are on the planet.
It sounds like good news. It is, relatively. But stand on a cliff above Walker Bay and look out over twenty animals; then imagine that they, and all their cousins, all their mothers and calves and mates, could fit into a small town stadium. Recovery is a fragile word.
On the screen, the whales continue their dance.
Their bodies are stocky, rounded, almost blunt by comparison with the sleek lines of a humpback or a blue whale. No dorsal fin interrupts their backs. Their heads are large and broad, those strange white callosity patches mapping brows and jaws like continents in reverse. Beneath the surface, baleen plates—long curtains of keratin hanging from their upper jaws—filter krill and small fish from the water. No teeth, just combs and patience.
They are calm. Curious. Capable of lifting their tails and “sailing” in the wind, using their flukes like anchors. Capable, too, of breathtaking surface displays: breaches that throw forty tons of whale into the air, landings that sound like the continent itself is applauding.
Today they are not performing. They are living.
THE WORLD WATCHES
Behind me, somewhere inside the villa, someone stirs. A bedroom sliding door opens. My guests step out onto the stoep, coffee mugs in hand, hair still soft with sleep. They see the drone in the air, then the whales below, then the feed on the tablet screen.
For a few seconds, no one says anything.
Then:
“You’re joking,” the younger boy breathes. “They’re…they’re really…?”
“Yes,” I say. “They are.”
His brother leans in, eyes flicking between real sea and mediated image, trying to reconcile scale. Their parents stand back a little, drinking their coffee, watching both the screen and the animals, faces opening in that way I’ve seen so many times when people realise they are not just witnessing a sight but an event.
All over Hermanus, at this hour, people are watching whales.
On the cliff path, walkers pause, cameras raised. At the Old Harbour, the whale crier’s horn waits to sound if someone spots a particularly good breach. On balconies and stoops and at café tables, tourists and locals alike scan the bay for blows and backs and tails. Hermanus in whale season is a town turned inward, eyes and binoculars and lenses focused on the bay like worshippers on an altar.
People travel from all over the world for this. From cities and continents where their closest encounter with wildness is a city park or a nature documentary in 4K. They arrive jet‑lagged, sun‑stunned, and then one morning they stand on a cliff in Hermanus and watch an animal older than their grandparents lift half its body out of the sea in slow, impossible grace.
On days like that, you can almost hear something recalibrating.
CLOSING THE CIRCLE
After a while, the whales separate.
The third one slides away, slow and unhurried, joining two others farther out. The pair that mated rest near the surface for a time, then begin to move together along the shoreline, following some invisible line parallel to the rocks. I follow with the drone a little longer, keeping my distance, then decide I have seen enough and pull back, sending the machine home with a soft, obedient whine.
On the stoep, the boys are already arguing about who gets the reel first. Their mother is quietly wiping at the corners of her eyes. Their father leans forward, as if trying to absorb the whole bay at once.
“Do they always do that here?” he asks.
“Not always,” I say. “Not like that. You can live here for years and never see mating that close to shore. But they do come back. Year after year. This bay is one of their nurseries.”
“When will that calf be born?” the daughter asks, eyes still on the sea.
“Not this year,” I answer. “If they conceived now, she’d be back in about twelve months, maybe a little more. Here. Or somewhere very close. Same coast. Same curve of land. Sometimes the exact same bay.”
We stand for a few more minutes, just watching whales breathe.
Somewhere deep beneath the surface, the one we have just seen mate carries, in her body, the possibility of another whale that will, in time, make this migration. That will feed in Antarctic waters in endless summer light, then swim thousands of kilometres north to find this curve of coast, this bay, this latitude. That will, if we do not make too many terrible decisions, lift its own calf to the surface in the calm waters below these cliffs.
The thought is almost too large.
THE ROMANCE OF RETURN
Later in the day, when the light hardens and the wind picks up, the bay will look different. Whales will still be there, but the intimacy will be gone. They’ll breach and lobtail and tail‑sail for their own reasons, and people on the cliff will cheer and clap and drink wine and take more pictures.
By evening, the moment will have turned into story.
We will talk about it over dinner on the villa’s terrace. We will pour wine from a valley seen earlier in the week. We will replay the footage on a big screen and freeze frames where the whales’ heads touch, where the fin lies across the back, where the bodies align in a way that almost looks like an embrace. We will talk, perhaps, about how Southern Rights were nearly gone, and how strange and lucky it is that we can stand on a luxury stoep in the twenty‑first century and watch them love.
But the truth of it will remain where it happened: in the water, in the blue light between cliff and horizon, in the private geometry of three whales whose names we do not know and whose lives will unfold mostly beyond our sight.
When I lie in bed that night, window open to the sound of waves on rock, I will hear, under the ordinary noise of a coastal town, the memory of that slow, deliberate dance. On days like this, I think of my own mom too—how love can cross years and oceans and still find its way back to the same quiet harbours in the heart, long after the person is gone. And I will think, as I often do in September, that for all our attempts to organise and interpret and own the world, the most romantic thing about it is this:
The whales come back, whether we are here to see them or not.
CLOSING THE CIRCLE
After a while, the whales separate.
The third one slides away, slow and unhurried, joining two others farther out. The pair that mated rest near the surface for a time, then begin to move together along the shoreline, following some invisible line parallel to the rocks. I follow with the drone a little longer, keeping my distance, then decide I have seen enough and pull back, sending the machine home with a soft, obedient whine.
On the stoep, the boys are already arguing about who gets the reel first. Their mother is quietly wiping at the corners of her eyes. Their father leans forward, as if trying to absorb the whole bay at once.
“Do they always do that here?” he asks.
“Not always,” I say. “Not like that. You can live here for years and never see mating that close to shore. But they do come back. Year after year. This bay is one of their nurseries.”
“When will that calf be born?” the daughter asks, eyes still on the sea.
“Not this year,” I answer. “If they conceived now, she’d be back in about twelve months, maybe a little more. Here. Or somewhere very close. Same coast. Same curve of land. Sometimes the exact same bay.”
We stand for a few more minutes, just watching whales breathe.
Somewhere deep beneath the surface, the one we have just seen mate carries, in her body, the possibility of another whale that will, in time, make this migration. That will feed in Antarctic waters in endless summer light, then swim thousands of kilometres north to find this curve of coast, this bay, this latitude. That will, if we do not make too many terrible decisions, lift its own calf to the surface in the calm waters below these cliffs.
The thought is almost too large.
THE ROMANCE OF RETURN
Later in the day, when the light hardens and the wind picks up, the bay will look different. Whales will still be there, but the intimacy will be gone. They’ll breach and lobtail and tail‑sail for their own reasons, and people on the cliff will cheer and clap and drink wine and take more pictures.
By evening, the moment will have turned into story.
We will talk about it over dinner on the villa’s terrace. We will pour wine from a valley seen earlier in the week. We will replay the footage on a big screen and freeze frames where the whales’ heads touch, where the fin lies across the back, where the bodies align in a way that almost looks like an embrace. We will talk, perhaps, about how Southern Rights were nearly gone, and how strange and lucky it is that we can stand on a luxury stoep in the twenty‑first century and watch them love.
But the truth of it will remain where it happened: in the water, in the blue light between cliff and horizon, in the private geometry of three whales whose names we do not know and whose lives will unfold mostly beyond our sight.
When I lie in bed that night, window open to the sound of waves on rock, I will hear, under the ordinary noise of a coastal town, the memory of that slow, deliberate dance. On days like this, I think of my own mom too—how love can cross years and oceans and still find its way back to the same quiet harbours in the heart, long after the person is gone. And I will think, as I often do in September, that for all our attempts to organise and interpret and own the world, the most romantic thing about it is this:
The whales come back, whether we are here to see them or not.