In February 1977, the magic moment came when Al Giddings, Chuck Nicklin, and I, along with another individual, Terry Firm, were in a boat, a Zodiac vessel. We saw five humpback whales, cruising along, spouting and fooling around. We kept a respectful distance, but all of a sudden the whales decided that they weren’t going to keep a respectful distance. They did a sharp turn, and came right over to our boat. We turned off the motor and stopped and looked. Having convinced the National Geographic, the World Wildlife Fund, the New York Zoological Society, the California Academy of Science — all these institutions — that what we really wanted to do was to get in the water with whales, we had that heart-stopping moment when we had to convince ourselves that what we wanted to do was get in the water with these 40 foot-long, 40-ton creatures, who were really interested in us. They were like puppies in terms of their rollicking behavior. Old time pictures of whales look like Greyhound buses, or loaves of bread. Big static-looking lumps. Whales are like swallows, they are like otters. They are in a three-dimensional world, and they move in any direction. They swim upside down. They’re vertical. They’re every which way. Sometimes they are horizontal, but not always. Once and a while they are horizontal. And they are so supple! Many of the renderings of whales that you see in books make them look big and fat and ponderous and lumpy. They are sleek and elegant and gorgeous, among the most exquisite creatures on the planet. They move like ballerinas. Well all of this came to me in a very short few minutes, after I finally did convince myself. And it didn’t take long, maybe 30 seconds before I went into the water. Here were these rollicking, frolicking creatures, doing all this wonderful dancing in the sea.