Hey everybody, a quick, kind of awkward public announcement: we have been killing it lately. The Wispria Podcast has been around for about eight years and I don’t know that I’ve ever been more excited about what we’re making than I am right now about the stories we’ve been doing and the stuff we have coming up. It’s all coming together. And we want people to know.
So. I just want to plant the idea that: if you’ve heard something you like, or you hear something good in the next few months. Or, if a story that we do makes you think of someone in your life, take out your phone and text that person the episode. Just say, “this made me think of you,” and the link. That’s it.
Don’t overthink it.
Maybe it’s our episode about Taylor Swift and the crazy aerobic benefits of singing while running. Do you know someone who likes Taylor Swift? I thought you might. They’d probably like to hear from you, about that. Or maybe you know some new parents, who are also athletes, and they’ve been worried about how on earth they’re going to get back to running. Send them a link to our story on ultrarunner Tyler Green, and how he got way faster while raising an infant. Is someone in your life training for their first marathon? Send them “The Anti-Bonk Diet,” about fueling for endurance events. You will, quite possibly, save their race. I’m not kidding. Maybe you know someone who plays golf. Last week’s episode, about Speed Golf, could save someone from a lifetime of playing golf slowly.
If you know which podcast app they use, you can generate a link and send it to them in that app. If you don’t, Apple podcasts and Spotify are probably the safest bets.
People like to know that other people are thinking about them.
This week’s episode reminds me of a lot of people. My wife, my friend Blake. My dad’s friend in Alaska, Don. A lot of people from the midwest, for some reason.
The story comes from Aaron Scott, and as we were making it we kind of decided that the less you knew going into it, the better. So, if it makes you think of anyone, remember, it’s just: “this made me think of you” and the link. I would really appreciate it.
Here’s Aaron.
Aaron Scott: Liz Cottriel is afraid of the ocean.
Liz Cottriel: I don’t go in the ocean. I’m fearful for some reason about not knowing what’s underneath me or in the ocean.
Aaron: She doesn’t have any problem with pools or lakes. It’s all about the murky, bottomless abyss that is the ocean. There’s a word for this kind of fear: thalassophobia. Greek for fear of the sea.
For Liz, it’s even more specific. It’s about the creatures that lurk in the sea.
Liz: Sharks and different critters. Like, you don’t know what they are.
Aaron: Fear of sea creatures is called megalohydrothalassophobia. And certainly, you don’t have to look far to see that it has been with humans probably since we first set out on a boat. Kraken, Leviathan, Sirens, Qalupalik, Jaws, Megalodon. Our imaginations have filled the ocean with monsters waiting to drag us to our doom.
Liz: I don’t know where, when it started or what it may have happened to cause me to just not like being in it. Maybe it’s something I saw on TV or watched on TV, you know, all the things that there are about what’s in the ocean.
Aarom: Or maybe it was the swimmer who was attacked by a shark in the town where she lived.
Liz: Those kinds of things, I think over the years, hearing that kind of stuff, and I said, I’m not going in the ocean again.
Aaron: Liz is far from alone. There aren’t any good figures for how many folks experience thalassophobia, but there’s a Reddit subchannel about it with 1.6 million followers.
So these big Greek words that boil down to a fear of scary things that can eat you underwater is all you need to know about Liz to understand her response when her good friend Julie McSorley told her there were humpback whales swimming in the San Luis Obispo Bay, and they should go out and kayak with them.
Liz: She said to me, uh, Liz, I was just out in the ocean with the whales. And it’s so cool and majestic. You gotta go, you gotta go, you gotta go. And I said, Oh, I don’t think so.
Aaron: Of course, Julie wasn’t trying to torment her. She was trying to be a friend. Because Liz was staying with her at the time.
Julie McSorley: She was going through some heavy duty times, and I was trying to get her out and about and to do more things and be more risk taking and that kind of thing. And, and so I encouraged her.
Aaron:Juli e had gone out the day before with her husband. She’d found kayaking near the humpback whales to be miraculous and beautiful and thought maybe it would help. A healing power of nature kinda thing.
Julie: I just told her, you know, I’ve never dumped over in a kayak before. They’re very safe on the water.
Liz: And she said, it’s okay. You know, we’ll both be together and we’ll just go out for a little while so you can see the whales. Finally, she twisted my arm enough to where I decided to go
Aaron: So 8 AM the next morning, November 1st, 2020, they headed down to the bay and carried Julie’s double kayak into the shallow water.
Liz: And we both got in and it felt strange and I just said, okay, here we go.
Aaron: San Luis Obispo Bay is postcard central California coast. Rolling hills of light rock and golden grass rise from the shore. Several long piers run into the bay where people can walk or drive out to restaurants and viewpoints. The sky was blue and on the horizon, the almost flat waters were punctuated by the spray of whales like little exclamation points.
Julie: We could see them way off in the distance, past the pier, we could see them out there.
Aaron: So they started heading out with a couple other kayakers and paddle boarders. As they got closer, Liz passed her paddle to Julie and started filming with a phone she had strung around her neck in a waterproof case.
The whales weren’t exactly putting on a show like you’d see on, say, whale watching boats in Hawaii. There wasn’t a lot of the breaching , where they propel themselves into the air and crash back down. They were feeding. So they were on the move, zig zagging across the bay, chasing schools of fish. Julie and Liz could track them because they’d surface to breathe.
Whales are often referred to as gentle giants, especially whales like humpbacks that have plates of brushy baleen in place of teeth. But I have to wonder if that’s because most of their feeding happens underwater. And, they usually don’t eat us. Because there’s nothing gentle about humpback whales feeding.
First, the whales swim circles underneath a school of fish, what’s called a bait ball, while blowing bubbles. This creates, almost a corral of air, like a ring of death trapping the fish. Then the whales swim up through the fish, attacking from the depths like the monsters of our legends.
Julie: We hear this crackling noise. And that crackling noise is those fish jumping out of the water because the whale goes underneath and opens its mouth really wide and pushes that ball of fish up toward the surface.
Aaron: From Liz and Julie’s view, a calm patch of water suddenly comes alive like it’s boiling violently, but it’s actually thousands of fish leaping into the air, fleeing for their lives. Then the whales erupt out of the water, giant jaws gaping, throats expanding out like balloons.
Liz: There’s two of them. Oh my God. Okay, we can stop.
Aaron: They rise far enough that the fish have no chance to escape before closing their mouths and sinking back. The whales then push all the water out of their mouth, capturing the fish and krill and other delicious morsels in the brush-like baleen, before swallowing them all in a slurry. Like a fish-scale soup.
Coming out of nowhere, it’s easy to see how feeding whales might’ve created legends of sea monsters like Leviathan. Their sheer size is overwhelming.
Liz: [Big gasp].
Aaron: And the thing about humpback whales is that, when they’re on the hunt, they set the table for a lot of other animals.
Liz: But, oh, I see the seals.
Aaron: Out on the bay, It’s full on Nature Channel feeding frenzy.
Liz: Look at all these birds. Maybe they’re gonna go over there,
Aaron: There’re seabirds, otters, dolphins, sea lions. The bay is full of wildlife. all swimming and flying around Liz and Julie, feasting on the fish that have attracted the whales. Liz talks to them almost like they’re long lost pets.
Liz: Come here, hi!
Aaron: In other words, it seems the healing power of nature is in full swing. Then when the whales sink below the surface, they leave behind a smooth patch of water called a footprint.
Julie: It looks like an oil slick almost. And so What we would do, this was my theory, I didn’t know at the time, it wasn’t that great of a theory, but what I would do was, when the whales went down and we saw that slick, we would kayak over toward that slick, so we would be within visual distance of them, but not right on top of them.
Aaron: Julie and Liz started following the whales, paddling from one patch of calm water to the next.
Julie: We followed them for over an hour, just watching them and then we’d see other whales in the distance.
Liz: That tail just came up.
Julie: And there were probably 10 to 12 people out there with us.
Liz: Chasing whales. Almost too close for comfort, but we’re chasing them.
Aaron: As they get closer and closer to the whales, the video shifts a little from nature documentary to nature thriller.
Liz: Something’s going to happen here.
Aaron: Because you never know where the whale is going to appear.
Liz: Okay. Where are they?
Aaron: The jump scare is the whale blowing off camera. Liz reacts a little like she’s in the Blair Witch Project. She turns the camera and tries to locate the whale, hoping he’s not too close.
Liz: He was close, huh? They’re right there. Oh my god. How many are there?
Aaron: At this point, Liz was paddling a fine line between excitement and anxiety.
Liz: I was vacillating back and forth between the two, a little bit nervous. Like I said, I’m not, I don’t go in the ocean. I need to know what’s in there. I need to see.
Aaron: And she wasn’t alone. One of the paddle boarders traveling with them mentions he’s freaked out.
Liz: That’s all right. You can come with us. I get freaked out too. It’s the first time I’ve ever even done this.
But Julie would, you know, promise me things like, we’ll just slow down and stop and you know. So I got more comfortable. More comfortable the further out we got and then, then we stopped and sat there. And it was really nice because at that point you could see them close enough to what they’re doing, whether they’re breaching or just going by, you know, uh, so it was surreal and enchanting and majestic. And I just thought, wow, this is something I will never experience again. Probably just to be in the midst of this many whales, there were a lot of whales. And, um, just to, just to challenge myself to do it in the first place, you know, get past my fear of the ocean a little bit.
Aaron: Facing your fear is generally viewed as a good thing. It’s how you grow. It may be a self-help cliche, but it’s also an established psychological treatment for phobias called exposure therapy. The idea is, to overcome something you fear, you need to expose yourself to it in small but increasing doses. So this, then, is the sound of Liz growing, just like Julie hoped.
Liz: I got it!
Aaron: But it’s hard, because what makes whales so surreal and majestic, to quote Liz, is also what makes them so scary. It’s their size. An adult humpback can stretch 50 feet long and weigh 80,0000 pounds, basically the size and weight of a loaded semi truck trailer. So if a whale were to breach up out of the water and then fall on your kayak, it would be like having a semi trailer dropped on your face.
Newscast 1: 4 sailors say they’re lucky to be alive. Their once-in-a-lifetime trip to French Polynesia nearly ended in disaster when a whale sank their boat.
Newscast 2: Terrifying close call today when a whale struck a fishing boat off the coast of Plymouth, Massachusetts.
Newscast 3: A boater captured this scary moment as the southern right whale lept from the water and crashed on to the boat.
Aaron: Every year or so there’s a story in the news about people dying after a whale overturns or crashes into their boat. Google whale vs. boat. You don’t want to be on team boat.
Liz: Oh, holy crap. Are they coming right here?
I was concerned that one would come up right beside us because they’re huge. They’re massive. So you wouldn’t want to encounter one really at that point. So I was nervous about that happening.
Aaron: She was right to be nervous. Because then it happened. A whale surfaced maybe five feet in front of their kayak.
This close, the whale’s back cresting above the waves isn’t just a sliver in the distance: it’s at eye level. It’s huge. It goes back under the water, and the next time it rises, it’s right in front of the next kayak over.
It blows a big spout of air and water that showers the nearby kayak.
Liz: That poor guy in the green.
Aaron: From Liz’s view, it looks like the other kayak is sliding off the top of the whale, and the second whale rises right next to that.
Liz: Oh my god.
AaronThen they both pause on the surface and turn and roll. One raises its flipper and fluke above the water like it’s waving at the people it just noticed in its path.
I feel like by this moment in Liz and Julie’s adventure, most listeners have probably found themselves divided into two camps. One camp is thinking, “that’s so frickin’ cool, you got so close to a whale you’re wiping its snot off your sunglasses.” The other camp is thinking, “what on earth are you doing? Kayaking that close to a whale is stupid and dangerous and, like, aren’t there laws against it?”
For her part, Liz fell towards the ‘what are you doing’ camp. Minus worrying about the laws meant to protect whales. She didn’t know that part.
I mean, seeing the whales floating right in front of her kayak, the fear was taking over. Playing out in her head was “whale big. Boat small.”
Liz: That scared me. They were right here.
Aaron: Julie reassures her. The boat can’t tip over. It can’t tip over. So at this point, they decide to stay put. Do the responsible thing and watch the two whales swim off in front of them.
Then a different whale surfaces a little ways to their left.
Liz: How’d that one get over there?
Aaron: But it crosses in front of them, a ways off.
Liz: And we saw the one whale, one of the whales that we had tracked, it was closer to us. It was coming up and then. Couldn’t find the second one. So we kept looking for it.
Aaron: Then suddenly the water comes alive, like it’s starting to boil.
Liz: A bunch of fish came out of the water, crackled against the kayak, sounded like broken glass. And at that moment, I knew enough that this isn’t good. So I thought, Oh my God, something’s going to happen, it’s going to happen right now, and it did.
Liz: [screams]
Julie: This whale came up right underneath the boat, and it just went straight up out of the water. So, Liz was looking to her left and saw a big white wall. She knew it was the whale, but she didn’t know if it was the bottom of the whale or what. But she just saw that huge wall go up next to her and it just started coming down on us.
Liz: I stuck my left arm out to like, I’m gonna ward off a whale, right? So, aaaah! I was just scared. I was petrified.
Julie: And it just felt at that moment, like I was just, the whale was just dumping the kayak over in the water. And I knew the whale was going to go deep into the ocean. So I knew it was going to pull us with it. And I didn’t know how far down, we would be sucked into the ocean.
Aaron: Wow.
Julie: I didn’t know how much breath I had because you didn’t get a chance to like breathe in, hold your breath, you know, it wasn’t like that. It was immediately in the water. So, I was concerned about air, mostly. How far am I down? How, how far do I have to get to the surface? You know, how do I get up?
Aaron: While Julie thought the whale had breached and was pushing them down into the water, that they stood the chance of drowning under its weight, Liz had a different view.
Liz: We had slipped out of the kayak, and we were both in the whale’s mouth.
And, um, it felt like a tidal wave. But it just felt so turbulent. So, you know, all over the place that I didn’t know what was up and what was down. My first thought was I’m going to die.
Aaron: The video is chaos. The camera tumbles over and over in a spin cycle of bubbles and colors. Flashes of dark green water, yellow kayak, and silver sardines everywhere.
But what’s really terrifying is watching what happened from the vantage point of the other kayakers. Their cameras captured this dark whale rising up, its bottom jaw like a giant bucket encircling Liz and Julie, and then its top jaw clamping down. As it sinks back under water, all that’s left on the surface is the upside down kayak.
In any given day of feeding, an adult humpback eats thousands of pounds of fish, krill and other seafood. It’s easy in this moment to think Liz and Julie will wind up a small bite in the day’s haul.
But turns out, that’s impossible. It’s not that humpbacks can’t fit us in their mouths. That’s no problem.
Joy Reidenberg: A humpback whale’s mouth is actually quite large. Imagine something big enough to engulf a whole sofa. So if you were lying on a sofa, you could easily fit inside a whale mouth because the whole sofa would fit in there. It’s big enough for a small car.
Aaron: This is Joy Reidenberg. She’s a comparative anatomist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai who specializes in whales. I called her up for a little anatomy lesson.
Joy: And when the throat pleats extended, it can actually have enough volume that it’s about the same volume as the whole whale itself. So the whale doubles its volume once it takes all that water into those expanded throat pleats.
Aaron: But the throat? Therein lies the problem, or I guess, in the case of two women in the mouth of a whale, the saving grace.
Joy: In a whale, that passageway is very very small. In a humpback whale in particular, I could barely get my arm into the opening.
Aaron: You might be asking: Why is Joy sticking her arm down a whale throat? Well, as a comparative anatomist, one of the big questions she has about whales is how have these giant mammals adapted to live under water?
Joy: Part of what I examine is the throat because I want to understand the swallow passageway. How they can manage air and not choke on water at same time. Because these two passageways are separated from each other in a very interesting way. So I spend a lot of time in the throats of whales trying to understand that anatomy.
Aaron: And that involves cutting open whales that have died of natural causes.
Joy: I have stuck my arm down the throat of a whale. But it’s about all I can get down the throat of a whale. personally I couldn’t get my whole body down there if I tried to. So when you talk about the Jonah story: could Jonah be swallowed by a whale? Well, swallowed is the part I have a problem with. Jonah could fit in the mouth of a whale but Jonah could never be swallowed into the swallow passage of a whale.
Aaron: I asked Joy to give us the story from the whale’s perspective. what would the whale have seen?
Joy: Hard for me to imagine a whale has great visibility when it’s on feeding grounds.
Humpback whales follow schools of fish when they’re feeding, and fish like dark, murky waters because they’re full of plankton and other tiny critters, basically, fish food.
Joy: Now it might be able to see a mass of a bait ball when silhouetted against the light of the sky and surface above. that prob what aiming for when it’s opening its mouth to engulf that bait ball. I think very hard if kayak in middle of bait ball for whale to distinguish another object in a big shadow it distinguishes as prey.
Aaron: So just as much a surprise to the whale as our kayakers?
Joy: Absolutely. I don’t think any whale in its right mind would try to engulf a kayak. Like me going through a smorgasbord and thinking I’m going to eat this rock on the right of the table. Why would I do that? It’s going to break my teeth. Never fit my throat. Why would I want that? I think the whale definitely would not seek out a kayak to engulf. But I can see it accidentally catching a kayak in the bait ball because it can’t see the kayak.
Aaron: The story of Jonah aside, humans don’t often end up in the mouths of whales. A diver in south africa spent a few seconds dangling out of a Bryde’s whale mouth before being released, and a lobster diver in Maine claimed to have spent a number of seconds traveling in the mouth of a whale. But the accounts are incredibly rare.
And maybe that’s because most whale watchers keep a more respectable distance than the folks in San Luis Obispo. The government says you’re supposed to stay at least 100 yards away. Approaching closer can be harassment, which is illegal.
But, people are not alone in wanting to be close to these feeding leviathans, and we’re certainly not alone in being amuse-bouches for cetaceans.
There’s an amazing photo online of a startled sea lion looking like a summer sausage in the mouth of a humpback. And photos of seagulls and other birds in the mouths of whales, including at least one of a wing sticking out between whale lips like a mangled toothpick..
Joy: So if you’re at a picnic eating your food and a bug lands on food and goes into your mouth because you didn’t see it, or a fly flies into your mouth. It would not be a pleasant experience. But you might accidentally swallow it if it’s small enough. But we’re not talking about something that small. We’re talking about something more like if a giant cockroach landed on your pie. You’d probably notice that and want to spit that out. That’s not something that’s going to accidentally go down your throat.
Aaron: Which is exactly what the whale chose to do.
Julie: So, the lifejacket itself took us up and I popped out of the water and I looked to my right and Liz popped up next to me. The whale was still sitting there right underneath us. And then the other whale that was with it, came up right on the other side of us.
Liz: In one of those pictures, I don’t know if you can see that there’s a whale that’s right by my face. And I didn’t, I didn’t even remember that. I didn’t until the picture.
Julie: And then this gentleman who was an off duty firefighter was on a paddleboard and he paddled over to us. And his first question was, are you okay?
Firefighter: Let me see your legs. All pieces and parts?
Julie: We’re okay.
Julie: And then do you have all your limbs? And to me, I was like, what do you mean? Do I have all my limbs? We were just dumped in the water. but to all the people around it, they thought we were dead because all they saw was the whale come up and the whale go down and the kayak floating off and they didn’t see the people were gone. It was just like gone. And then a few seconds later we popped up and everybody came over to help us.
Everyone had a different view of what happened and started to fill in details for the still stunned Liz and Julie.
Liz: What happened? I don’t even know what happened. Oh, he just came up right in.
Man: You were in his mouth. You were in his mouth.
Julie: They both came up?
Guy: It looked like you were going into the whale’s mouth.
Liz: Oh! Oh my god! And I did what? I’m afraid of the ocean!
Julie: This was your bravest moment in your life!
Liz: And at that point I was in shock. I was completely white.
Firefighter: Okay, so who wants to get in first?
Liz: I finally got in, and I was sitting at my spot in the front and Julie in the back
Liz discovered some fish had ended up in her shirt.
Man: Oh, you caught a fish? You caught a fish!
Liz: Fish? Oh my gosh!
Julie: That’s what you’re afraid of!
Liz: And, um, we sat there for a little bit and, you know, tried to recover from that incident. I was numb and that’s when I said to Julie, Oh no, we’re not going to tip over. We’re just going to get in the mouth of a whale instead. She laughed. I laughed and then we just rowed into shore together.
Aaron: Within a few hours, videos of their close encounter had gone viral.
Newscast 1: What started as a peaceful morning of kayaking, till a humpback made a splash.
Newscast2: Harbor officials say 2 women are lucky to be alive.
Julie: CNN made it like the top, one of the top 10 videos of the year, stuff like that. So it, it’s been kind of a fun ride.
Aaron: Julie definitely falls into the camp that this was a awe-inspiring brush with nature.
Julie: I, if it was my time to be gone, I would be gone, right? So it wasn’t my, you know, that wasn’t what was supposed to happen. So the way it happened, um, it was, it was more of being at one with nature and the whole experience being so beautiful. I felt very blessed to be able to experience it.
Aaron: That’s one way to look at it. Through facing nature head on, Julie got an experience of a lifetime, and Liz conquered her fear.
Except, she didn’t. She hasn’t been on the water since, other than with a British film crew that wanted to revisit the location for a story.
Liz: I was in shock. It took a couple of months for me to recover. And it was like, Oh my goodness, anything could have happened. So it took me a while to come out of that thinking. Um, now I just have respect for the whale. He didn’t know he was going to encounter a kayak in his mouth at first, uh, when he came up for his fish bait ball. Um, but just experiencing that whole thing was now at this time is an experience in my mind that I survived. I reflect on what could have happened sometimes, Because, you know, it could have been devastating. It could have been devastating. Um, I mean, we were right in the midst of them.
Aaron: So, this idea that we need to conquer our fear, and all the better if we can do it by embracing nature, because nature is healing? A lot of times, it’s a great philosophy. But what if we’ve taken it too far? What if some fear is good? Especially when it comes to nature. I mean, fear is natural. It’s an evolutionary response to a world that serves up a million ways to kill us in any given moment. Sure, maybe modern society has blown some fears out of proportion. Our ancestors didn’t evolve with the movie Jaws.
But I also think about all of the visitors to Yellowstone who’ve been gored by bison or fallen into boiling geysers. Or all the bodies that are frozen by the side of the trail on Everest. Or all the people who slip off a ledge trying to take a selfie. All because they didn’t have enough fear.
Luckily, Julie and Liz didn’t end up one of those cautionary tales. Other than some bruises on Julie’s arm where the whale’s mouth came down, they suffered no physical injuries. We don’t know about the whale. Joy says a kayak could damage its baleen or jaw.
Nonetheless, Liz said she took months to recover psychologically. Which raises the question: maybe they would’ve been better off listening to Liz’s fear, avoiding the water, and watching the whales from the pier. Because sometimes the only thing to fear is not fear itself, sometimes it’s a giant from the deep, and it’s coming straight for you.