Feb. 25, 2002 – Be careful what you wish for; you just might get it, some say. "Things I've wanted or thought a lot about have been manifesting for me lately," Jon Euwema says, "but this was incredible, unbelievable, totally amazing."
He is speaking of swimming with a 40-foot humpback whale.
"It was like swimming up to a reef …" Euwema said, "Jurassic proportions."
Euwema, who has lived in the Virgin Islands all his life, said he had dreamed for years about swimming with the massive mammals. "My dad's had me fishing since I was 4 years old. I grew up on the water," he said. "But this was magical."
Euwema, an artist and architect, took some friends — friends knowledgeable about water and fish — out for some snorkeling and fishing Sunday in his 22-foot wooden island fishing boat. "It's a good boat, it has good vibes, and it wasn't easy to get," he said.
Indeed, the boats are coveted by fishermen. Euwema got his from an older fisherman from St. Kitts who "made his livelihood with it, but had to give it up after two strokes, and I got it about six months ago." He said he hasn't decided what to name his "lucky" boat yet.
On Sunday, after catching a good-sized kingfish, the group headed for international waters, toward a spot where Euwema had been before. The dolphins "manifested "themselves.
"It was an amazing happenstance. I'd seen some in this same spot last Monday," Euwema said. "They came right up to the boat and wanted to play — a male about 9 feet, and about five smaller ones. They dove with us and they played with us."
He wouldn't disclose the spot, in order to protect the dolphins' playground. "Last week they were mating, and they still played," he continued, "and believe me, they're not monogamous; they were switch-hitting."
But the dolphins were a mere preview of what was to come Sunday. Euwema sensed another "manifestation" coming on. "It was so calm, the weather conditions were perfect, and somebody said, 'I betcha we're going to see whales.'"
Soon a mother humpback and her baby surfaced about 100 feet from the little boat. "We jumped in," Euwema said — him and "a pretty experienced water man from Florida." Another passenger was very knowledgeable about whales, "sort of a whale authority," he said. "She told us, 'Don't crowd them; don't cut them off.'
"We swam close, but not too close," Euwema related. "We could hear them breathing and slapping their tails on the surface We were about 40 feet from them. They were playing and moving around, and then they dove, and the baby came back up to check us out. The mother got between us and the baby and swam about 2 feet from us. I kept remembering, 'Don't crowd them, don't cut them off.' It became my mantra."
The mother "was at least 40 feet long," he recounted. "When they decide to turn around, you don't want to cut them off at the snout, and you don't want to be by their tail. I could see some 3-foot remora — sucker fish — attached to her side. They clean the whale."
Another danger is the barnacles which attach themselves to whales. "They get to be about 3 inches around, and they could rip you open," Euwema said. "The mother didn't have many, and the baby was clean, fresh and about 22-feet long, same as my boat."
And then, the piece de resistance, the big time. "The mother glided over toward me, and I swam about 50 feet right next to her. I couldn't believe how calm I was," Euwema said. "Someone had told me about looking in their eye, and I wanted to do that, I tried to do that, but the visibility wasn't good."
Euwema has seen whales, on and off, all his life from a distance. He reiterates, "I've just always wanted to do it, to swim with them."
A couple years ago, off Stumpy Point, he and his father, retired insurance executive Roland Euwema, saw a mother whale and her baby playing. The mother "was teaching the baby how to breach," he said. But since they were in a 14-foot boat in 8-foot seas and didn't know what they would do if the mother turned on them, they decided it wouldn't be wise to stay.
"I've seen whales out by the north drop-off lots of times, but there's high seas out there and lots of sharks," Euwema added. "You have to have ideal conditions."
He had seen some just a few days earlier, in fact, "off Fortuna when I was out there with a client. We heard a woosh, and about 100 yards off the coast, there they were."
Reflecting on his adventure Sunday, he said, "It's funny how your parents react to things. My mother [Luisa Euwema] was, like, 'You're crazy!' and my father said, 'That sounds really good.'" The experience is still very much with him. "I've never been a whale activist — I don't have 'Save the whales' bumper stickers," he said, "but I want to go back out. I want to look in the eye."
As the 39-year-old St. Thomian talks, he sounds as if he is 18. "You have an experience like that, and you feel like you're 18," he said. "You revert back to being a kid. It's a spiritual feeling; it makes you feel very young, very small, very humble. It makes your interaction with smaller mammals like mankind kind of insignificant."
