How to Swim Responsibly With Sperm Whales in the Caribbean

In my experience, the central danger of swimming with whales in the open ocean is not that you will get smushed or chomped by a multi-ton marine mammal or somehow vanish into the deep but, rather, that you may contract a scorching case of whale-swimming fever. This is a condition for which there is no known cure: those afflicted live in a state of perpetual longing, always dreaming of returning to the water and the whales. I should know. I’m one of them.

For chronic sufferers, one of the world’s most alluring destinations is Dominica (doh-min-nee-kah), a mountainous dollop of a nation in the Lesser Antilles, the Caribbean’s southeasternmost arc of islands. There, a population of around 200 sperm whales resides year-round in warm and sheltered waters. Historically, a strict permit system has kept commercial whale swimming to a minimum — a good thing for both the whales and their human guests, since fewer swimmers mean less disruption and higher-quality, more ethical encounters. And in 2023, the Dominican government announced plans to establish the world’s first marine protected area for sperm whales, a 300-square-mile reserve that could help secure a brighter future for these remarkable animals.

Earlier this year, I found myself descending in a turboprop through golden evening clouds toward Dominica’s steep and jungled shoreline. The plane was full — not with other aspiring whale swimmers but with folks returning home for the multiday, pre-Lent party that is Carnival, or Mas Domnik, as it’s called on Dominica. This timing had escaped my notice until, while boarding, I’d helped a fellow passenger skirt the cabin baggage restrictions by carrying on his trumpet case. “Her name is Annabel,” he told me gravely about the instrument. He was a jazz musician from St. Croix on his way to play Carnival gigs. When I explained about the whales, he looked at me like I was headed to a fire-juggling competition. “You’re adventurous,” he said. “Only sometimes,” I said, which was easier than explaining the fever. 

In 2016, I went to Tonga to swim with humpback whales for this magazine, a peak life experience. (And, yes, I am angling for the title of Chief Whale Correspondent.) I’ve swum with dusky dolphins and New Zealand fur seals and spent some time helicoptering around the Canadian High Arctic attempting to swim with belugas. As I said, no known cure.

My taxi driver switchbacked up into the mountains as darkness fell amid a drenching rain. Measuring 29 by 16 miles, Dominica is a volcanic island, alive with hot springs and earthquakes, and its rainforested interior has the unsettled ruggedness of young Earth not yet worn down by time. Lists of tourist to-dos typically include Champagne Reef, where bubbles rise through the ocean from volcanic springs, and Boiling Lake, a flooded fumarole in Morne Trois Pitons National Park that, well, boils. As we crossed Dominica’s spine away from its Atlantic side and began descending west toward Roseau, the capital city, the temperature rose, the air made balmy by the warm Caribbean Sea. I looked over the water and imagined the whales, hidden in the depths.

My trip was organized by Natural World Safaris, which operates wildlife trips on all seven continents and tends to inspire persistent loyalty among its clients. Two swimmers in my group of four, Chris and Carole Skelt, were NWS veterans with two future trips on the books. NWS works with a dive shop near Roseau, Dive Dominica, as well as the American trip leader Patrick Dykstra, an underwater cameraman and whale-swimming pioneer. 

As a teenager, gobsmacked by the scale model of a blue whale in the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., Dykstra resolved to swim with one, an ambition (now realized many, many times over) that would shape his life. He became a corporate lawyer to fund his travels and eventually quit to chase whales full time, accumulating elite photographic chops along the way and winning a BAFTA for his work filming orcas for Blue Planet II. He’s been visiting Dominica and its whales for 15 years.

“There’s a deep trench that comes particularly close to shore, and the island’s topography creates a really good lee,” Dykstra said, explaining why the Caribbean side of Dominica is a premier spot for swimming with sperm whales. “No one’s out looking for whales every day on the Atlantic side. It’s too rough.” Cold currents flowing through ocean trenches bring nutrients that attract giant squid, a key food source for sperm whales. Diving several thousand feet in search of squid is no big deal for these creatures; they spend their lives commuting back and forth to depths where light can’t penetrate, using sound to find their prey. 

Sperm whales have an oil sac in their heads, the spermaceti organ, that helps them focus their echolocation clicks. This same oil almost brought about the species’ extinction, as spermaceti, used to make candles and lamp fuel, was a prized commodity during the era of widespread commercial whaling, and hundreds of thousands of sperm whales — gentle animals that live in tightly bonded social groups — were killed for it. Today, sperm whales’ clicks are the subject of renewed interest: a well-funded scientific program based in Dominica, Project CETI, or Cetacean Translation Initiative, is attempting to use machine learning and robotics to decipher the way the animals communicate. If successful, the project could shed profound light on sperm whales’ cognition and behavior, and even change our understanding of the nature of language.

Echolocation clicks were crucial to our mission, too. For five days, we followed the same routine. At 8:30 in the morning, the three other swimmers and I set out in a small boat with Dykstra and a team from Dive Dominica: guide Nigel Seraphin, captain Irwin “Stinger” Dublin, and Marcus Hodge, who did a bit of everything. We would motor offshore, and they’d stick a homespun but effective hydrophone (a neoprene-covered salad bowl at the end of a pole, plus headphones) in the water, listening for the telltale clicks, which might sound like fingernails tapping idly on metal or come in a rat-a-tat burst if a whale was zeroing in on a squid. Because hunting sperm whales usually dive for around 45 minutes and surface only for 15 or so to breathe, timing was everything. “There she blows!” someone would shout when a whale surfaced with a cloud of exhalation.

On our first morning, we found a whale quickly. I pulled on my fins and snorkel, eager and shaky with nerves. As soon as Dublin got into position and cut the propeller, I slid off the back of the boat with Dykstra and Fernanda Barreto, a Brazilian woman on her dream trip, making as little splash as possible. The water was calm, but so dense with sediment washed in by a night of heavy rain that we could barely see past arm’s length. I swam close to Dykstra, popping my head up occasionally. Above the surface, the blocky front of the whale’s massive head came closer and closer, seeming almost to loom over us, but still the murk in the water concealed her. My body pounded with suspense. Where was she? Dykstra grasped Barreto’s arms and mine, binding us into a raft. Suddenly the murk turned to gray flesh. The whale materialized just feet away, filling my field of vision. I caught a glimpse of her eye inspecting us before she dove, her descending body and tail sliding smoothly under us.

“It was too fast!” Barreto said as we bobbed on the surface afterward, waiting for the boat to pick us up. “It was not enough! I want to be saturated with these animals.” Her symptoms were clear. The fever had struck.

Carnival falls on the Monday and Tuesday before Ash Wednesday, and as far as I could tell, a lot of revelers don’t sleep for 48 hours. At 7:30 on Monday morning, I walked into Roseau from my hotel, a harrowing mile along the shoulder of a narrow and busy road, to catch the end of J’ouvert. This, the kickoff celebration, had started well before dawn, fast dance beats pulsing over the island in the wee hours like the human version of whale clicks. In town, flatbed trucks with stacks of speakers 15 feet high rumbled slowly through the thronged streets near the waterfront. Local DJs and performers moved on top of them, blasting bouyon, a local fusion genre. Crowds bounce-shuffled behind, dancing and drinking probably-not-water from water bottles. Few tourists were in evidence; the party felt like a real community gathering, and also like an endurance sport.

Most of the lyrics were in Kwéyòl, Dominica’s French-based creole, which has roots stretching back more than 300 years. Post-Columbus, the indigenous Kalinago people successfully repelled would-be Spanish colonists, but by the late 18th century, France had claimed the island, later to be supplanted by the British. Dominica gained independence in 1978. Some 2,200 Kalinago people still live on the island and make up the largest surviving Indigenous community in the Caribbean, but most Dominicans are of African or mixed descent, a legacy of enslaved people brought by the British. Seraphin told me that during Carnival, people in his village drum on goatskins and crack whips. “The whip is from the time of slavery,” he said, “but now they whip nothing, just air, to symbolize the end of that.”

On Tuesday afternoon, after we were done swimming, the boat dropped me at a dock in town, and I surfaced from the whales’ monochromatic world into an explosion of color and sound. The subwoofing trucks were creeping along, now accompanied by parading groups of mostly women in coordinated outfits who were competing for the title of Band of the Year under names like Fantacy Tribe, Amnesia Carnival Band, and Hysteria Mas. The dancers were of all shapes and sizes, dazzling in skimpy bodysuits, fishnets, garters, and headdresses with neon feathers and sequins.

When I paused to buy a peanut punch (think liquid peanut butter with rum), the street vendor asked if I was enjoying Dominica. I said I was. He broke into a big smile. “It is the most beautiful island in the world,” he told me, “with the most beautiful people!”

It is a beautiful island, with beautiful people, but over the course of the past decade, Dominica has had some very hard knocks. In 2015, Tropical Storm Erika brought heavy flooding, and two years later Hurricane Maria devastated the island, damaging or destroying upwards of 90 percent of homes and traumatizing pretty much everyone. The toll of the hurricane is still visible: heaps of debris, boarded-up and roofless houses, whole buildings sliced open like dioramas. Dublin especially mourned the loss of the public library in Roseau. “The kids used to go there in the afternoons after school,” he said. “Now they’re just on their phones.” The island is hungry for income. Cruise ships come through, but because Dominica doesn’t have many of the white-sand beaches prized by Caribbean visitors (and major hotel chains), it remains an off-the-beaten track destination. 

These economic pressures have added complexity to the process of drawing up rules for the sperm whale reserve. It has yet to be decided how exactly shipping and tourist activities will be regulated and, importantly, enforced. More people than ever are eyeing the whales as a potential revenue source, lobbying government officials to loosen up with the permits or trying to call in favors. I spoke to one such official, who acknowledged the challenge. “For the system to work, the rules have to be the same for everybody,” he said, “and that means telling powerful people they have to wait their turn. But it’s not a midnight viewing of the Mona Lisa. It’s an animal.”

Before this year, Dykstra told me, the government had issued only one swimming-with-whales permit per month, so his guests always had the whales to themselves. This year, possibly because of uncertainty around the reserve, it has been a bit of a free-for-all, with as many as four boats trying to put swimmers in the water at the same time. Sometimes the boats cooperate, taking turns, but not always. One afternoon we saw one boat put six people in the water with a group of whales, when the legal limit is three swimmers and one guide. Whale-watching boats hovered around, and another swimming boat zoomed toward the scene. The vibes were hectic. We left. 

“I mean, I get it,” Dykstra said. “People need to make money. The island is struggling. But you have to think about the long term.” In Sri Lanka, for example, an unregulated bubble of whale-watching and swimming around blue whales popped when the animals moved farther offshore, possibly following krill, but also perhaps fleeing the attention.

“Some of the operators don’t care about the welfare of the animals,” Seraphin added, “but I don’t want to be part of the downfall of a species.” Seraphin and Dykstra both hope the government returns to a one-permit-per-month model for the sperm whale reserve. Dublin suggested the idea of a week in between sessions when the whales could rest. He asked what word I might use to describe sperm whales. I said dignified, citing the watchful way they looked at us, the stately manner in which they dove, their mastery of their environment. “I would say breathtaking,” he said. “I see people get out of the water crying. They want to hug me. We have to be more mindful of the welfare of the animals and more conservative with them. Because what you see, I want my grandchildren to see.”

Seeking out encounters with wildlife often brings up uncomfortable questions for me. If I love whales and want to experience them in their environment, how can I do that without doing harm? Is it wrong to even try? The dangers and disruptions whales face from shipping, fishing, underwater noise, and climate change vastly outweigh the impact of a few people with snorkels, and, as we all know by now, tourism can be an important driver of conservation. For better or worse, when a species brings jobs and income and national pride, people are more likely to protect it. 

So here is some advice for being a responsible whale swimmer, as distilled from conversations with my guides in Dominica as well as my experiences elsewhere. If someone approaches you on a beach, offering a day trip to swim with whales, don’t go. Accept that you will have to invest time and money to have an experience that is rewarding for you and minimally invasive for the whales. Be prepared to be patient. If permitting is strict — as it should be — you may have to plan far ahead to secure a spot on a well-run trip. Confirm not only that your outfitter has a permit but also that it follows the rules. It’s a good sign, too, if the outfitter can share concrete ways that the company gives back to the community and environment. Natural World Safaris, for example, has helped Dominica’s small-scale fishermen buy equipment that is more visible to large ships, reducing the likelihood that a ship will hit and break it. This saves the fishermen money and reduces the amount of ocean trash that can entangle whales. It’s a simple thing, but everybody wins.

We encountered whales on all of the five days we went looking for them, sometimes solo animals and sometimes pairs or small groups. We swam in glassy calms and eight-foot whitecapped swells, dropped in with whales who wanted nothing to do with us and others who rolled over and swam under us, belly up, emitting otherworldly clicks as they scanned our bodies with sound. 

“I barely saw it!” Barreto said more than once after a whale had passed, even at close range. I knew what she meant. I felt like it was never possible for me to be present enough. I had a sense of greedy insatiability every time I saw a whale. I wanted to understand more about them, to know everything — maybe, outlandishly, to be one of them. 

On my last drop, two whales swam slowly closer and closer, regarding us in their intelligent, inscrutable way. When the nearer of the two was just feet from me, my GoPro decided to freeze. I jabbed at the buttons in mounting frustration. But, in the nick of time, I thought, You’re missing it. I stopped fussing. Just watch, I told myself. And remember. 

The whale flexed her enormous body and dove. The movement was so beautiful, so effortless. Her tail oscillated with a serene power, and she vanished headfirst into the cobalt depths. Of course, that whale — the whale I don’t have a picture of — is the one I dream about most, the one I remember best.

Seven-day Dominica experiences with Natural World Safaris, which are limited to five guests, start at $9,130 per person.

A version of this story first appeared in the October 2024 issue of Travel + Leisure under the headline “Deep Dive.”