Maybe I Should Call This…The Geezer’s Guide to Stupidity
You may know that I started a series of books called the Geezer’s Guide. The first one is The Geezer’s Guide to Adventure. I plan to do a bunch more like The Geezer’s Guide to the Cook Islands and the like. If I were to include this story, it would have to be in a book called The Geezer’s Guide to Stupidity. Here we go…
On February 5, 2026, I got a call…”Don, we think we can find a sperm whale carcass off shore. Do you want to go with us at 6am tomorrow to look for it? ” First thought…heck yes. Second thought…I wonder how we will get out of the harbor before dawn in the morning, given the big surf now on the island. Third thought, I should probably bring an above water camera and an underwater camera…under the right circumstances, I might just be able to slip into the water and get a shot of the whale carcass being fed on by sharks.
We made it out of the harbor without incident. We then headed toward the last known location of the sperm whale carcass…some ten miles out. Once we got there, we followed the current lines and eventually found the carcass, maybe seven miles from shore. Stoked.
The above water camera came in handy. I used my long lens to capture clear shots of a tiger shark head, enormous and well out of the water, munching on the whale carcass. I also notice a Zodiac boat and then noticed two snorkelers in the water. They seemed to have all their limbs. Ok…I am getting in.
That middle photo is of the front of the 60 foot long sperm whale carcass and that thing sticking out is his jaw. Most of the teeth were gone, but a half dozen were still there and they were the size of your fist. Sperm whales are the largest toothed whale. Males can grow to over 70 feet and weigh more than 50 tons. I have no idea if this was a male or female, nor its exact size…but it was BIG.
I had a friend with me that was not planning on getting in the water. After some delay, he decided he could not miss this, perhaps once-in-a-lifetime, opportunity..so he borrowed a facemark and fins and an extra wetsuit vest I had with me…and in he went. We had others with us and they were already enjoying the full show.
From the first moment I hit the water, I saw three oceanic white tip sharks…about as big as they get…very near my friend and myself. Before I could take a defensive position (basically…line up my camera housing to use it as a shield), the sharks moved away and off into the depths…and the depths were maybe two miles down…not that they would go that deep, but the bottom was WAY down there. I found that unusual, as I have been in with oceanic white tips many times and they like to come over and bump you, looking for an opportunity to bite you. Some people enjoy that interaction. I do not. I call myself “Three bump Donny”…the third time an oceanic bumps me, I start looking for ways to get back on the boat.
So why did the oceanics disappear on us? That mystery did not last long. I looked under our boat and there was as big a tiger shark as I have ever seen. It was coming right at us, slow and methodical. I have always felt that they get curious about the electronic sounds and field put out by my underwater camera…and I feel the same about their curiosity about my bright red swim fins. That is not a bad thing…we want them to come close for the photography. However, I do not understand their off shore behavior well enough to know if that might also trigger an attack. In this case, and in all the other encounters on that day, absolutely no attack was triggered. None of the sharks made us uncomfortable with their behavior. The sheer number of them…four tiger sharks…up to a dozen oceanic white tips and assorted other large critters…caught our attention, but really never made us uncomfortable. The only times I felt uncomfortable was returning to the boat…and I promise I had both help returning and kept my head on a swivel.
The sharks were bloated. They cruised around…disappeared from time to time and then circled below and around us and the carcass. Every now and again, they would go over to the carcass and plow into it, mouth first, shaking their heads and biting off huge chunks of blubber and whatever else was left. This made the water right around the carcass kind of green and hazy and filled with oily blubber chunks…an area I tried to get good photos in, but soon realized the photos would not be good and the action was too dangerous for me. So…we stayed a bit off of the carcass, but in the middle of the action.
There were other attention getters…I saw dolphin pass below us, but almost out of sight. I saw a bunch of mahi mahi trying to find cover under the carcass or boats…but quickly deciding that maybe they should exit the area stage left, pursued by a bear (an old stage direction quote from William Shakespeare). I noticed other fish, rainbow runners…often the companions of tiger sharks. I think I noticed a remora…not sure. There was a fishing boat next to the carcass with fishermen casting into the area trying to catch ahi (which I never saw) or mahi. I am never very comfortable when people are casting lures in our general area…but there were no problems…we all kind of worked our “assigned” areas. There was also a boat that was trolling for large critters near by…I kept my eye on it. Did not see any birds diving on the area, but heard there were a couple of brown boobies that came to visit…we noticed them earlier on the VV buoy off-shore.
At some point during the day, we heard live sperm whales clicking, but I was unable to see them underwater. This occurred well away from the dead whale. I could see them from the boat and photographed a mom and baby from some distance and from the boat.
As the day wore on, several other boats arrived. We were about swum out and returned to the boat and to the harbor. We all felt it was one of the most exiting ocean adventures of our lives. And my friend that had not planned to get into the water to experience this event…I think he had the most fun of all of us. He was all in and stayed calm…head on a swivel and camera clicking for some of the most interesting underwater shots of his life.
Over the next two days, the carcass floated in toward the island. It came to rest at a beautiful, and a bit remote. beach north of Kona. I will not be snorkeling there for a month or so. My wetsuit is already just one notch on the smell-o-meter from having to throw it away.
Over the past few days, I have watched videos and seen photos from others who were there over the couple of days prior to the beaching. Some of the best underwater people on the island (many of whom are my friends and whom I greatly admire) …and a couple of the best underwater and shark people in the world…Ocean Ramsey and her husband, Juan Oliphant. In these videos and photos you get to see how the conditions changed. One of the ones just before the beaching mentioned a dozen tiger sharks and Galapagos sharks and you can clearly see the bottom…the rocks and coral. So happy I got my window into the action.
Our Lava Light Gallery partner, C.J. Kale, had to work in our gallery and missed the grand show. This drove him one step away from crazy, so he managed to find someone to take him out there for sunset and got some amazing shots. Good on CJ.
As I think back on this adventure…and I have been doing a lot of that these past few days (and dreaming about it)…it just had to be done. Smart or not, I will be 79 in a month or so…completely sure I will never have that chance again. I did not approach it lightly. Did not just jump in to see what might happen. I have had decades of experience around sharks and in deep water…know how to protect myself if need be…always have my head on a swivel to see what is around and below me or coming my way…I was in the water with experienced and skilled shark divers and with a captain who I trust completely and with whom I have hundreds of hours of experience in conditions some might consider sketchy…that we consider normal. I did all the things I tell others to do in my book, The Geezer’s Guide to Adventure, and turned that seemingly scary experience into a thrill of a life time.
Was I scared? Scared has nothing to do with it. If I let fear guide my actions, I would have missed out on some of the highlights of my life…being in with salt water crocs, handling a king cobra, climbing down lava cliffs in the dark, surfing big surf, exploring underwater caves on a breath of air, entering bear and wolf country at night in Yellowstone, getting caught in an volcanic “hailstorm”, exploring Yellowstone in winter at minus 40 degrees, hiking out, or going out by boat, to the running lava and doing so in the middle of the night, experiencing a near plane wreck on Mafia Island off of Tanzania for a chance to swim with whale sharks again, speaking live at Wrigley Stadium in front of a big crowd, giving speeches in front of crowds large and small, running the high hurdles for about ten years of my life, cliff climbing, hang gliding, glider trips, small plane trips into sketchy runways, marriage. Yup…all of those scared me. So what? I didn’t do any of them on a whim (well, maybe a couple were on a whim) and I always proceeded with some thought and care. Scared is just a feeling that causes me to slow down, think through the good and bad possibilities and then either proceed… or go home and watch tv. I normally proceed.
That is my story…and I am sticking to it.
Aloha,
Don