Standing on the deck of a catamaran in Maui, the visual spectacle is only half the story. You watch a massive forty-ton koholā (humpback whale) launch its entire body clear of the water, crashing down into the sapphire-blue moana (ocean) with a concussive shockwave that rattles right through your boots. But the moment you drop…
My salt-crusted field journal sits open on the chart table, pages warped from decades of moist air and flying spray. Inside, marginalia scribbled during thousands of hours on the bridge details the exact micro-seconds a koholā (humpback whale) breaks the surface of the moana (ocean). Capturing that explosion of forty tons of ocean life airborne…
My salt-crusted field journal from two decades on Maui waters contains hundreds of hand-drawn sketches of tail flukes and dorsl fins, yet the sheer scale of the seasonal transit never ceases to awe me. Every autumn, thousands of koholā (humpback whales) abandon their summer feeding grounds in the high-latitude Pacific to embark on a 3,000-mile…