Saturday Video: Whale Watching, Up-close & Personal in Dominica
Remember a couple Saturdays ago when I shared my memories of the late-summer Sundays of my youth watching baby turtles hatch on the best beach in the world? Well, turtles weren’t the only wildlife on Sandy Point with whom we tried to get up-close and personal.
On many of those magical Sundays, we’d often see a pod of dolphin racing around the extreme western point of the beach, heading northeast toward Frederiksted. Fueled with liquid courage, we’d always race into the water and swim out to where they were.
Unfortunately, we never caught up to them. In the fading light of those late afternoons, it’s doubtful we would’ve seen them too well anyway.
The missed opportunity of this Sandy Point memory stands in extremely stark contrast to the video featured below – a simply breathtaking encounter with a sperm whale captured on-film off the coast of Dominica.
Sperm Whale Encounter from Howard Hall on Vimeo.
This striking, almost unbelievable video is the work of Howard Hall, who together with his wife Michele, rank among the top natural history filmmakers today specializing in marine wildlife. If you’re a fan of the PBS series Nature, or National Geographic TV specials on the undersea world, then you’ve no doubt marveled at their work before. Or maybe you’ve caught a few of their IMAX films – Into the Deep, Island of the Sharks, Deep Sea 3D and Coral Reef Adventure, among them.
In short, the Halls’ work represents the pinnacle in modern undersea filmmaking, a fact made clear in this brief, yet absolutely phenomenal video that puts a perfectly uncommon spin on the type of whale-watching most people (even us!) feel lucky enough to experience from a boat.
Whaddya’ say Patrick, next time let’s jump overboard!
For more on the Halls and their groundbreaking work, click here to visit their website.
