Striking Distance

He was sinking like a stone in the Caribbean Sea, but Randy Thornton knew that if he opened his mouth to scream, he would drown. The normally tranquil reef had suddenly filled with bubbles, making it impossible to see more than a few metres in any direction. It was like being underwater in a spa bath. Writhing in pain, Thornton tried desperately to swim to the surface. He was afraid to look down.

Four days earlier, on the first day of his holiday, Thornton awoke with a start just after sunrise. Something was different. He looked over at his wife Gwen. "Do you feel that?" he asked. They’d stopped moving. After a choppy, 12-hour yacht voyage, his group of snorkellers had finally reached the Silver Bank reef, about 150km off the coast of the Dominican Republic. It is one of the few areas in the world where you can get to see humpback whales and their young up close.

"Come on, let’s go up," said Randy, pulling on his swimming trunks. Gwen jumped out of bed and followed in her pyjamas. She and Randy had waited years for this moment, to snorkel near whales in their natural environment. Seconds later, they were on deck of the 36m Turks & Caicos Aggressor II, taking deep breaths of sea air and leaning against the rail to look out over the shimmering water.

Randy and Gwen watched as a dark grey humpback breached, throwing its 36-tonne body into the air with the ease of a gymnast. When the whale landed 30 metres from the boat, the sound was deafening, like a thunderclap accompanied by a heavy rain. Droplets of water from the splash shrouded the deck in a fine mist.

The couple were nearly in tears. How could a creature the size of a bus move with such grace? They were joined by several members of their American group and by the boat’s captain, Piers Van Der Walt, who came every season from the Turks and Caicos Islands to ferry tourists to Silver Bank.

As Van Der Walt pointed out three other whales surfacing near the boat, spouting water from their blowholes, everyone rushed from one side of the deck to the other. One whale came within seven metres of them, bobbing part of its head out of the water to check out the Aggressor with its saucer-sized left eye.

Randy Thornton, 50, had never let living in a landlocked desert in Utah keep him from his passion of exploring the sea. An owner of a Salt Lake City music production company, he decided to buy a scuba-diving shop with a friend five years ago, so he’d have another reason to spend his spare time in the water. After he and Gwen, also 50, took up diving in the early ’90s, "it was all we wanted to do", he says. "That feeling of weightlessness and seeing creatures that few people get to see – it was marvellous."