2
Eye-to-Eye with Giants
“Some loves are loud and fleeting. The deepest ones cross oceans in silence and still find their way back to the same hidden bays in our lives—year after year, long after the eyes that first loved us are gone.”
John Sparks
FIRST LIGHT OVER WALKER BAY
Some mornings the ocean feels like it’s leaning in to listen.
Our first day in Hermanus breaks like that.
I step out onto the villa stoep just after sunrise, coffee in hand, barefoot on cool stone. The house hangs on the cliff edge, the kind of place someone once dreamed up and then had the courage—and the capital—to build: clean lines, glass, quiet luxury.
This morning all of that is background. The real theatre lies eighty metres away.
The sun is still climbing off to the left, pushing soft gold into the bay. Walker Bay is barely moving. Not flat, exactly, but its long, slow swells look as if some great hand has smoothed the surface.
The sky is pure September: high, clear blue that hasn’t yet hardened into summer. The air carries the smell I’ve come to associate with this stretch of coast—salt, kelp and a faint metallic tang that only belongs to deep water.
I lift the binoculars before I even sit down. I already know what I’m hoping to see.
I don’t need them to see the first blows.
THE BAY FILLS WITH BREATH
From the stoep my world is framed by glass balustrades and low white walls, but the view is wild and old.
To the right, the coastline runs toward the New Harbour in serrated rocks and white water. To the left, the cliffs curve away toward Kwaaiwater. Straight in front, Walker Bay opens like an 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 twenty Southern Right whales scattered across the water. Blows show first—vertical jets against the calm blue. Two blowholes, two plumes, a brief, sharp‑edged V of breath that hangs for a moment and then dissolves. Then backs: black, smooth, enormous, rolling up and over in slow arcs. Here and there a tail lifts, dark and wide, water streaming silver in the light before it disappears with the weight of a closing door.
Hermanus calls itself the world’s whale‑watching capital. On days like this, that’s not marketing. It’s geography.
Every year, from about June to November, hundreds of Southern
Rights leave the icy plenty of the Southern Ocean around Antarctica and move into these warmer coastal waters. They come here for the same reasons we seek out warm, safe rooms: to make love, to give birth, to raise the next generation without having to fight for every mouthful.
They are loyal to their maps. A third of the world’s Southern Right population uses a handful of bays like these 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 bay where they 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 a few minutes to notice the three directly in front of us.
Most of the whales are scattered—pairs, trios, solitary animals moving with the lazy confidence of things that know they’re not being hunted. But about eighty metres out from the villa, slightly to the left, three lie close together in an almost suspiciously neat triangle. They’re just far enough from the others to feel deliberate.
I raise the binoculars again.
Two lie nearly parallel, a few body lengths apart, pale callosities standing out cream against black. The third moves in a slow arc around them, circling.
There’s no drama. No obvious performance. Just a different quality of attention.
I feel my own attention sharpen in response.
I put my coffee down carefully, feel my pulse kick up a notch—not from caffeine—and reach for the drone case.
“Something’s happening,” I murmur, more to myself than to the empty stoep.
LIFTING INTO THEIR WORLD
The whine of the DJI’s rotors feels almost rude in this softness, but the whales ignore it. I check the wind—light, perfect—glance at the screen, and send the drone out over the water.
From fifty metres up, Walker Bay rearranges itself.
The villa that felt central a moment ago shrinks to a pale box on the cliff edge. The cliff path becomes a dark ribbon. Hermanus itself pulls back into a scatter of roofs and trees between mountain and sea. The whales, which from the stoep looked like moving commas on a flat line, reveal their full, three‑dimensional selves: forty‑ton bodies suspended in water so clear I can see paler scars on their backs and the shadows they cast on kelp beds below.
I ease the drone toward the three to the left, then slide into a gentle orbit above them. The screen fills with their world.
Two lie side by side now, bellies almost touching, angled toward each other. The third holds position a little ahead and off to one side, turning, watching.
Nothing frantic. No rushing. Just small adjustments—a roll of a flank, a fin lifting a little higher, a slow turning of the head. But after thousands of hours with these animals, something in the pattern is unmistakable.
Courtship.
I realise I’ve been holding my breath. I let it out slowly, settle my hands, lean closer to the feed.
THE DANCE BELOW
At 2× zoom, the intimacy is almost unbearable.
The two central whales begin to roll, bellies brushing, callosities glowing pale against the blue. Those roughened patches—thickened skin colonised by whale lice and barnacles—are their fingerprints. Researchers photograph them year after year, building life histories that can outlast a human job or even a human life.
Some of the whales in this bay are older than I am.
Southern Rights can live a hundred years if we let them.
The male eases into position with a patience that belies his size. If he wanted to, he could move with enormous force—these are animals that cover thousands of kilometres in the open ocean with casual efficiency. Here, now, everything is gentleness.
From above, their choreography is clear.
They surface and submerge in slow synchrony, bodies tracing loose figure‑eights in the blue. The male arches slightly, then rolls, tucking himself under the female with care. She tilts, lifting her tail to make space and then settling. The third whale circles, sometimes closing the distance, sometimes easing back, as if unsure whether to leave or bear witness.
There’s a moment when the male’s pectoral fin lifts and then settles gently onto the female’s back, resting there like an arm across a shoulder.
He holds it there for a few seconds, 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 heads touching, callosities brushing. It probably isn’t that, in any human sense. But if love has a shape in the ocean, there are worse candidates than this.
And without warning, as I watch that contact, I think of my own mother.
She’s been gone since 1987. Four long years of illness before that.
Yet the big, quiet moments still bring her into the room—or onto the stoep—without asking. It’s not logic. It’s how memory and love work when you live much of your life on the edges of big things.
For a few breaths, whales in the lens and a woman I loved who never saw any of this occupy the same space in my head. Then the whales roll, the moment passes, and the work of watching returns.
GIANTS IN CONTEXT
For a while I forget about everything except the small screen in my hands and the blue beneath it.
The house, the coffee, the guests still sleeping inside—it all falls away. There is only this circle of moving water and three whales allowed to go about their business without a boat on top of them.
Southern Right whales were once the “right” whales to kill. Slow moving, curious, rich in oil, they floated when dead. Between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, whalers took them in their tens of thousands from these coasts and others. By the early 1900s, some populations were down to a few dozen breeding females. Fewer whales than people in a village.
Protection came on paper in 1937. In practice, the killing didn’t really stop until the later twentieth century. Since then they’ve climbed back slowly. Some groups grow at around seven percent a year. It sounds healthy until you remember how low the starting point was.
Today there may be thirteen to fifteen thousand Southern Rights left on the planet.
On the screen, the trio below me look perfect. Whole. Exactly where they should be.
From up here I see them as bodies and patterns. From a larger height they are statistics. Both truths sit on top of a third: if we make too many bad decisions in the next few decades, mornings like this will be something people only read about.
For the moment, though, they are simply here, in their bay, doing what their kind has done for longer than anyone can remember.
Stocky, rounded bodies. No dorsal fins. Broad heads mapped with pale callosities like reverse continents. Under the skin, baleen plates—keratin curtains hanging from the upper jaw—to filter krill and small fish from the water. No teeth. Just hair, combs and time.
Today they’re not putting on a show. They’re living.
THE HOUSE WAKES
Behind me, the villa starts to wake.
A door slides. A coffee machine coughs into life. Soft footsteps cross tile.
The family steps out onto the stoep one by one—parents with mugs, kids rubbing sleep from their faces. They see the drone in the air, then the whales below, then the feed on the tablet.
For a moment no one speaks.
“You’re kidding,” the younger boy says at last, voice gone thin.
“They’re…actually…?”
“Yes,” I say. “They’re really doing exactly what you think they’re doing.”
His brother leans in, eyes flicking between the real sea and the image. Their parents stand behind, hands around mugs, faces doing that quiet opening I’ve come to recognise: the point where “holiday” tips into “we might remember this for the rest of our lives”.
All over Hermanus, at this hour, people are watching whales: walkers on the cliff path, early risers in guesthouses, the whale‑crier at the
Old Harbour with his kelp horn ready. The town turns inward in whale season, every balcony and bench facing the bay like pews.
People come from all over the world for this—from cities where their wildest regular sighting is a fox in a dustbin or a surprisingly large pigeon. They arrive bleary from flights and time zones and then one morning they stand on a cliff and watch an animal older than their grandparents lift half its body out of the sea.
I’ve seen a lot in sixty‑plus countries, and this still moves me.
Watching them see it for the first time might move me even more.
CLOSING THE CIRCLE
After a while, the whales separate.
The third slides away, slow and unhurried, joining two others farther out. The pair that mated rest near the surface, then begin to move along the coastline, following some line written into their internal chart.
I follow with the drone a little longer, keeping a respectful distance.
When my own sense of enough quietly taps me on the shoulder, I pull back, bring the machine home in a gentle arc.
On the stoep, the boys are already negotiating turns on the screen. Their mother brushes at the corners of her eyes. Their father leans on the rail, like he’s trying to steady himself against the size of what he’s just seen.
“Do they always do that here?” he asks.
“Not always,” I say. “You can live here for years and never see mating this close to shore. But they do come back. Year after year.
This bay is one of their nurseries.”
“When will the calf be born?” the daughter asks, eyes still on the water.
“Not this year,” I answer. “If they conceived now, she’d be back in about twelve months. Here, or somewhere very close. Same coast.
Sometimes the exact same bay.”
We stand together a little longer, watching whales breathe.
Deep under the surface, the female now carries the possibility of another whale who will grow in this water, feed in Antarctic light, and one day learn this coastline by heart the way its parents have.
The idea is almost too large for this neat stoep with its glass and stone. But size has never stopped truth.
THE ROMANCE OF RETURN
Later, when the light hardens and the wind picks up, the bay will feel less intimate. The whales will still be there—breaching, tail‑sailing, rolling—doing their own work. People on the cliff will cheer and clap and lift their phones.
By dinner, this morning’s slow dance will already have turned into a story.
We’ll sit on the terrace above the sea, pour wine from Hemel‑en‑Aarde, and replay the footage on a screen. We’ll pause on the frame where the fin rests on the back, where the heads touch, where the bodies align so clearly there’s nothing ambiguous about what you’re seeing.
Maybe I’ll tell them, lightly, about whaling in this bay, about how close we came to losing this entirely. Maybe we’ll talk about how strange and lucky it is that we can stand on a cliff in the twenty‑first century and watch something like this happen without anyone lifting a harpoon.
But the real weight 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 don’t know.
Later that night, lying in bed with the window open to the sound of waves on rock, I’ll hear, underneath the ordinary clatter of a coastal town, the memory of that slow, deliberate dance. And I’ll think again of my mother, and of how love seems to find its way back to the same quiet harbours in the heart, long after the person has gone.
And I’ll think, not for the first time, that for all our attempts to manage and own the world, one of the most romantic things about it is this:
The whales come back, whether we are here to see them or not.