Tonga Humpback Whales

Whales are exciting and spectacular creatures. In Tonga, they used to be hunted for their meat, oil, and blubber. Brave men hunted the whales with harpoons and rope. The harpoonist would stand up the front of the boat and throw the harpoon into the whale. The harpoons were attached to the tongan boat with very long ropes and the whale would tow the boat until it got tired. When the whale was exhausted the Tongan whalers would stand on top of the whale and then sew up the whale's mouth so that no water would get in and the whale might sink to the bottom of the ocean. The most dangerous part of harpooning was to watch out for the females because the males might attack the boat. The Tongan harpooners would feel sorry if they killed a mother or calf.

In the last century modern whaling almost drove humpback whales to extinction. Eventually the king of Tonga stopped the killing of whales in tonga. People now come from all over the world to see and swim with the whales. In Tonga you can find carvings of whales and their babies. The people of Tonga now make money from whale watching instead of killing them. You cannot use scuba gear to dive near whales, you must free dive with snorkel and goggles.

Free diving with the whales in Tonga allows you to be one with the ocean and nature. You can go onto a whale watch charter boat. You can swim with the mother and calf humpback whales. If you go out every day the whale might get to recognise you and say hello. The baby humpback whales could come right up to you and might even play with you. Sometimes the baby will be suckling from the mother humpback whale. YOu may be specially lucky if you see the baby suckling. The whales come right up to the boats and surface and sometimes splash the tourists with their blowholes. The whales are so close that you can almost touch them. The whales do a lot of flapping their flippers out of the water and occasionally you will see a whale breaching, that is jumping right out of the water and splashing down spectacularly into the water. The Tongan Whale watching charter boat may broadcast the whale song through a special electronic device.

The whales come to Tonga to mate and the males sometimes get aggressive and fight over a female. They demonstrate their territorialism by breaching and displaying themselves. The sheer power of the whale is awesome. They must have enormous strength to launch their huge bodies out of the water. Humpbacks are the only whales to sing contact songs which are in constant change. If you get to swim close up to a mother and baby humpback whale is an amazing experience that you could do too. The baby whale will meet all sorts of creatures and go to all sorts of places and then come back here to mate himself. How could anyone murder such a delightful and intelligent creature of mother nature? It is beyond me to even contemplate such a bad thing.

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