Niue 8

One afternoon while sitting in my room I felt a movement of my chair. I was sitting at a table and saw several items on it shaking. Later I googled and found out that there had been a major earthquake close to Tonga and that is the shake we felt on Niue as well. It wasn’t bad though.
Let’s get back to the whales. I didn’t always jump in with the others. A few times I tried but once I tried and swam and swam and swam but didn’t reach the group. So finally I gave up and got back on the boat. The current had been too strong. One time I was on the boat when Roxy told me to jump as two whales were coming on to the boat. I jumped in and then decided that since I was in the water anyway I could swim to the group. When I was a short distance away from the boat I saw the shark. I turned around and swam back to the boat. I learned that day that you need to keep looking at it. I hadn’t seen that it had lost interest in the group and started to swim towards me. But then he was not interested in me either and went down. Which was good. But after I heard that I was a bit nervous. We had other encounters with that shark and the group knew then that we needed to keep looking at him. He was not dangerous or aggressive – just curious. But better to keep an eye on him because you never know…. 😉

One day we went out very far in the water where we had a group of 5 whales (and a bit later the shark 😀 ) and there was a lot of action. Looks like two teeny boys were trying to impress the mom who was more interested in her calf. The baby was on top of her and to the guides it was not clear if the males wanted to get rid of the baby. Having babys is mating time for the whales as well so the males give all they have to impress the females. One of the two teens (they were smaller than the third male) was breaching all the time and waving with his side fin. Mom was not impressed though. I went in the water on the first jump and have some pics of all of them. We got back on the boat when the shark came by. The others went back in the water later but I stayed on the boat because I wanted to take pics of the jumping teen. I started to count when he started to breach again and stopped counting at 13. He must have jumped all the way to Tonga… 😉 (at least 20 times). That was unbelievable…

In the afternoon we went back to the East Coast because the team wanted to go back to the canyon where I had been watching the waves. I had intended to go to the Canyon as well but I had already walked a lot that day so I couldn’t do it. Watched the waves again. And found that the parking lot might be a party location as in a small cave there was a big loudspeaker. Restrooms and a shower were there as well… 😀