Part one of two on swimming with pygmy blue whales. Written before we meet them.
The line I can’t write
Two weeks before a production trip, we write the films before we make them. Scenes, shot lists, the story we hope the ocean will let us tell.
This time, one line keeps stopping me.
Pygmy blue whale. In water.
Our route this season crosses the waters where these whales migrate. Every year from October to December, they pass through the Ombai-Wetar Strait off Timor-Leste, a deep channel that works like a highway for whales and dolphins. There’s a real chance Luca and I will see one. There’s a real chance we’ll be close enough to get in.
I have never been in the water with a great whale. I have swum with spinner dolphins and cried into my mask until my tears mixed with the salt water. A blue whale is the largest animal that has ever lived, and I might get to share the same water with one.
So why can’t I write that line? It’s a short line, but it holds a big question: should we be swimming with pygmy blue whales at all?
What I want
I want it. I want it so much it scares me.
I want to float in the blue and watch the biggest animal on Earth pass beneath me. As filmmakers, we want the frame and the film. I want to feel what I felt with the dolphins, times a thousand. Some of that is love. Some of it is ego. Separating the two is harder than I’d like to admit.
And wanting something this much is dangerous. It’s how good intentions end up in the wrong place in the water. I’ve watched this turn people into chasers underwater numerous times.
A hungry giant on a long road
The pygmy blue whale is the smallest blue whale, which sounds funny for an animal that grows to around 24 metres. More than 600 of them swim through the Ombai-Wetar Strait each year. They head north between June and August and come back south between October and December.
The ones we might meet will be heading south, back to Australia. They travel around 5,000 kilometres from the Banda Sea to their feeding grounds. In the Perth Canyon, they dive more than 300 metres deep for krill. Off southern Australia, they feed on swarms of krill near the surface.
Marine ecologist Karen Edyvane has watched these whales in Timor-Leste since 2016. In recent years, she has seen many of them pass the coast emaciated. The most likely reason is warming water, which disrupts the cold upwellings that bring their food.
Picture a marathon runner at kilometre 35. Starving, legs shaking. Then a crowd walks onto the course for selfies.
If we get this wrong, that crowd is us.
What happens when people get in
I read the research, hoping it would give me the permission I wanted, but it didn’t.
Swimming with whales can disturb them more than watching from a boat, because the boats get closer to drop people in. In Western Australia, scientists followed humpback whales before, during and after swims. The whales sped up, changed direction, and showed more aggressive behaviour when tour boats came within 100 metres. In Hervey Bay, whales rested less when people swam with them than when people only watched.
Rest is the one thing a hungry whale on a 5,000 kilometre journey can’t afford to lose.
Most of these studies only measure what happens in the moment. Nobody knows yet what years of swimmers do to a whale’s life or to a whole population. For the whales passing Timor-Leste, there are no studies at all, mostly because nobody has paid for them.
Some people will read that as “no proof of harm”. I read it as “nobody has counted the cost yet”.
I’ve seen this before
One year later, I went back. I found a small pod of ten to twenty tired dolphins. One had its dorsal fin cut clean off. None of them jumped. None of them made a sound. Then the day boats came, and I watched zodiacs chase the dolphins and drop people on top of them while they came up to breathe.
I hid on the lower deck and cried because I knew my videos were part of how people found that reef. We stopped leading trips there.
Photo: Luca Keller / Underwater Lunatics.
When I read about Timor-Leste today, it felt like Sataya all over again.
In late 2025, Mongabay reported what an underwater photographer saw there. Too many swimmers around one whale. Too many boats chasing the same pod. People jumping in on top of a whale every time it came up to breathe. Nobody was checking whether a mother had a calf with her. A local instructor blamed customers who want the perfect Instagram video. Tour operators there are already fully booked for 2026 and 2027.
Edyvane fears Timor-Leste could go the way of southern Sri Lanka. In the south, where most of the whale-watching boats operate, researchers found whale-watching boats approaching too fast and too close and linked this to blue whales moving away from the area. Warming water is probably the bigger reason Sri Lanka’s blue whales are disappearing. But that makes it worse, not better. A whale that’s already struggling has nothing left to spend on escaping us.
We’re also foreigners. Many Timorese people feel shut out of the whale business because none of the big operators there are locally owned. Two Europeans writing about it from a boat is part of that picture, and we know it.
Edyvane said it simply: “You shouldn’t be stopping any animal from feeding, mating or nursing.”
Why we film anyway
I also believe that nobody fights for something they’ve never seen.
In the first half of the 20th century, around 350,000 blue whales were killed, most of them in the Antarctic. Then in 1970, Roger Payne released recordings of humpback whales singing. People heard them and cared. That feeling helped build the movement that ended commercial whaling.
That’s why we make films. A picture or a sound can reach people that numbers never will.
But a film doesn’t change behaviour just by existing. When researchers tested the famous “Blue Planet effect” in a proper experiment, viewers learned more about the ocean, but they didn’t change what they bought. Knowing isn’t doing. Our footage isn’t automatically good for the whales.
And Payne’s first whale songs came from a Navy engineer who was listening for Russian submarines. The sound that helped save the whales was recorded from a distance. Nobody jumped on anyone.
So the real question for us is what kind of image we take, what it costs the whale, and what it does once it’s out in the world.
The whales we’re still eating
Whales survived the harpoon. Now people take their food and swallow it in capsules.
In August 2025, the Antarctic krill fishery closed early for the first time ever, after boats hit the 620,000 ton limit. Norwegian boats caught more than half of it. Most of that krill ends up as krill oil supplements, feed for farmed fish, and pet food.
The pygmy blues we might meet eat a different krill, off Australia. The Antarctic catch hurts their cousins, the Antarctic blue whales, humpbacks and fin whales. Same family, same story. We love whales on our screens and eat their dinner.
You don’t have to swim with a whale to help one. If there’s krill oil in your cupboard, stop buying it. Switch to algae oil. It’s where the omega-3 in krill and fish comes from in the first place.
Our rules, written before we see the whale
Adrenaline makes bad decisions. A whale at the surface, a camera in our hands, a once-in-a-lifetime moment, and every principle suddenly feels negotiable.
So we’re writing our rules now, while we’re calm, and publishing them so you can hold us to them.
We’ve said no before. On a production in the Maldives, the whale shark encounters weren’t run in a way we could support. So we didn’t film them. The film we delivered to our client has no whale shark shots in it. No matter who runs the boat, the decision to get in the water is ours. So is the responsibility.
We never swim toward a whale. If we get in, we get in far away from its path and wait. If it comes closer, that’s its choice. If it doesn’t, we watch it leave.
No jumping in on top of a whale. Not in front of it, not while it’s coming up to breathe.
No mothers with calves. If there’s a calf of any size, we stay on the boat.
No thin whales. If a whale looks exhausted or skinny, nobody gets in. It still has a long way to go.
No crowds. No more than four people in the water. If another boat is already with the whale, we don’t jump.
One try, then we go. If the whale changes direction, speeds up, dives early or slaps its tail, we get out and don’t try again with that whale.
The boat comes first. We’ll film from the deck, with a drone high enough that the whale doesn’t react. Getting in is the exception.
No live posting, no locations. We won’t geotag and won’t say where or when. I already helped turn one sanctuary into a chase.
Our footage won’t sell whale swims. If we film a whale, we’ll not use it to advertise swimming with whales.
I don’t know yet
I can’t tell you what we’ll do. We need to be there. We need to see the water, the whale and the other boats. I need to feel into myself and know what I can live with.
The rules come first. The shot comes second, or not at all.
This isn’t only about us. Every time you like a video of someone floating next to a whale, you’re voting. Tour operators see those numbers. So do filmmakers like us.
When we’re back, I’ll tell you what happened. Whether we got in or stayed on deck. Whether we kept every rule or broke them.
Sources
Mongabay, “Unregulated tourism risks disrupting Timor-Leste’s whale migration” (Dec 2025): https://news.mongabay.com/2025/12/unregulated-tourism-risks-disrupting-timor-lestes-whale-migration/
Pacific Tourism Organisation, Timor-Leste whale watching season announcement (Oct 2025): https://southpacificislands.travel/timor-leste-announces-start-of-whale-watching-season/
Nigel Marsh, “Blue Whales Timor Leste Divelog”: https://www.nigelmarshphotography.com/blog-posts/blue-whales-timor-leste-divelog
Möller et al. (2020), “Movements and behaviour of blue whales satellite tagged in an Australian upwelling system,” Scientific Reports: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-78143-2
Sprogis et al. (2020), “Behavioural responses of migrating humpback whales to swim-with-whale activities in the Ningaloo Marine Park,” Journal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0022098119301194
“Informing the in-water humpback whale interaction management program in the Ningaloo Marine Park” (2026), Frontiers in Conservation Science: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/conservation-science/articles/10.3389/fcosc.2026.1868120/full
IWC Whale Watching Handbook, Sri Lanka country profile: https://wwhandbook.iwc.int/en/country-profiles/sri-lanka
Mongabay, “Blue whale decline in Sri Lanka tied to climate and human activity” (Apr 2025): https://news.mongabay.com/2025/04/blue-whale-decline-in-sri-lanka-tied-to-climate-and-human-activity/
GEMM Lab, Oregon State University, “Roger Payne: A life dedicated to whale conservation”: https://blogs.oregonstate.edu/gemmlab/2023/07/11/roger-payne-a-life-dedicated-to-whale-conservation/
Dunn et al. (2020), “Evaluating the impact of the documentary series Blue Planet II on viewers’ plastic consumption behaviors,” Conservation Science and Practice: https://conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/csp2.280
Mongabay, “Antarctic krill fishery closes months early amid increasing fishing pressure” (Aug 2026): https://news.mongabay.com/2026/08/antarctic-krill-fishery-closes-months-early-amid-increasing-fishing-pressure/
Southwest Victoria blue whale observations: https://www.swifft.net.au/cb_pages/sp_blue_whale.php
Tourism Western Australia, “Protecting the gentle giants of Ningaloo Reef”: https://www.westernaustralia.com/us/plan-my-trip/planning-tools/travel-stories/protecting-the-gentle-giants-of-ningaloo-reef
Ryan, Fraser and Symington (2013), “Algal-oil supplements are a viable alternative to fish-oil supplements in terms of docosahexaenoic acid,” Proceedings of the Nutrition Society: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/proceedings-of-the-nutrition-society/article/algaloil-supplements-are-a-viable-alternative-to-fishoil-supplements-in-terms-of-docosahexaenoic-acid-226n3-dha/21FF5EDE40FEE862C14F53A05A5F0FC8
Food Ingredients First, on the algae origin of omega-3 in fish: https://www.foodingredientsfirst.com/news/study-algal-oil-as-a-possible-source-of-omega-3-fatty-acid-dha-to-improve-blood-lipids-in-people-without-heart-disease.html
