The unhurried undulation of a whale’s movements is nearly inseparable from the rolling swells of the sea, making them easy to miss and hard to believe. That is, until we are surrounded by three pairs of mothers and their calves—six in total—revealing themselves to us one fin and blowhole at a time. “Come on, come on,” I hear one of my fellow passengers whisper greedily. Their backsides are not enough. We want the tail.
I can’t blame him. We’re on day five of the week-long sailing, and I’ve had two tail sightings thus far. Both times, we were much farther away, looking out to sea from atop the Venture’s observation deck. But even from a distance, the wavelike motion of a whale’s fluke lifting into the air had the power to slow time. Each time it dove back under, I felt my heart swell and drop with it.
Now we’re so close I can hear them breathe. “Over there!” someone yells, and we immediately turn to face starboard, pointing our fingers and cameras and binoculars into the vast blue, a deep ultramarine that feels inherently at odds with the desert’s barren hills. But the humpback does not understand our frantic gestures and quickly disappears back to the depths from which it came. As we rock and sway with the surf, our TikTok-length attention spans are held captive in the sea’s primordial rhythm. So we wait.
While we’re looking for whales, they’re paying close attention to us too, explains our guide, Luis Cuarenta, a Cabo Pulmo resident who has been leading snorkeling, scuba, and whale watching tours for the past eight years. “When I dive with the sharks, and they pass right above me, you can see their eyes watching you,” he says, still in his wetsuit from snorkeling with a group earlier that morning. “They know what you are, but they just want to be close to you.”
To him, building that mutual relationship with the whales is the best part of his job—and the reason thousands of tourists travel to Baja to see them each year. “It makes you feel part of something,” he says. “They know that you exist, and you know that they exist.”
The sightings, while very much real, are still miraculous. Just 30 years ago, Cabo Pulmo’s 20,000-year-old coral reef was depleted by years of overfishing—bringing some species, like the scalloped hammerhead shark, near ecological extinction. After grassroots campaigning by the local community, the reef was declared a Natural Protected Area by the Mexican government in 1995. Within the first 10 years, the no-take zones where fishing was banned saw over a 460% increase in fish biomass, an incredibly impressive species recovery rate.
