From The Silver Bank Reef
He was sinking like a stone in the Caribbean Sea, but Randy Thornton knew that if he opened his mouth to scream, he would drown. The normally tranquil reef had suddenly filled with bubbles, making it impossible to see more than a few feet in any direction. It was like being underwater in a Jacuzzi. Writhing in pain, Thornton tried desperately to swim to the surface. He was afraid to look down. Four days earlier, on the first day of his vacation, Thornton awoke with a start just after sunrise. Something was different. He looked over at his wife, Gwen. "Do you feel that?" he asked. They'd stopped moving. After a choppy, 12-hour yacht voyage, his snorkeling group had finally reached the Silver Bank reef, 80 nautical miles off the Dominican Republic. It is one of the few areas in the world where you can observe humpback whales and their young up close."Come on, let's go up," said Randy, pulling on his swim trunks. Gwen jumped out of bed and followed in her pajamas. She and Randy had waited years for this moment, to snorkel near whales in their natural environment. Seconds later, they were on the deck of the 120-foot Turks & Caicos Aggressor II, taking deep breaths of sea air and leaning against the rail to look out over the shimmering water.
Randy and Gwen watched as a dark-gray humpback breached, throwing its 40-ton body into the air with the ease of an 80-pound gymnast. When the whale landed 100 feet from the boat, the sound was deafening, like a thunderclap accompanied by a heavy rain. Droplets of water from the splash shrouded the deck in a fine mist.
The couple were nearly in tears. How could a creature the size of a city bus move with such grace? They were joined by several members of their Utah-based group and by the boat's captain, Piers Van Der Walt, who came every season from Turks and Caicos Islands to ferry tourists to Silver Bank. As Van Der Walt pointed out three other whales surfacing near the boat, spouting water from their blowholes, everyone rushed from one side of the deck to the other. One whale came within 25 feet, bobbing part of its head out of the water to check out the Aggressor with its saucer-size left eye.
"So Darned Huge"
Randy Thornton, 50, had never let living in a landlocked desert keep him from his passion of exploring the sea. An owner of a Salt Lake City music production company, he decided to buy a scuba-diving shop with a friend five years ago, so he'd have another reason to spend his spare time in the water. After he and Gwen, also 50, took up diving in the early '90s, "it was all we wanted to do," he says. "That feeling of weightlessness and seeing creatures that few people get to see -- it was marvelous." Randy and Gwen had been on numerous trips to Mexico, Belize and the Gal´pagos Islands to swim with dolphins, rays, squid, even hammerhead sharks. Their three children grew up in the water, exploring coral reefs and snorkeling among tropical fish. Family vacations usually involved counting starfish instead of roasting marshmallows.Now, with the kids out on their own, the Thorntons decided to pursue their dream of observing whales up close. Randy signed up 16 of his friends and customers to join them at a cost of about $5,000 each. But Silver Bank is such a popular attraction, with limited access, that the group had to wait almost three years to fly to the Dominican Republic and climb aboard the Aggressor. Among those who made the trip last February were the Thorntons' friends Bridgette Server, 39, and her husband, Brit, 37, avid divers who'd hoped to film the whales. Bridgette's parents, Don and Janet Blackwelder, a real estate developer and homemaker, 65 and 60, were among the oldest in the group.
After breakfast that first day, everyone put on snorkeling gear and split into two groups to take inflatable boats some five miles out to a large breeding ground for hundreds of humpbacks. For months, the whales, who begin their travels from as far as the Arctic each fall, stay in the shallow reef to give birth, teach their young and carry on courtships in the subtropical waters.
Randy and his group stayed at the reef for three to five hours a day, floating on their stomachs to look facedown through the clear turquoise water at the whales below. At first, Randy felt nervous around the mammals "because they're so darned huge," he says. Gradually he began to relax.
"We started to feel so comfortable," says Janet. "It was easy to forget just how powerful these creatures are."
"Wow, check it out -- a baby whale!" said Randy, pointing to a smaller humpback spouting near the inflatable boat. All week long, he and his team had hoped to observe a whale calf up close. Now, on the last dive of their vacation, they were getting the chance. A mother whale was drifting with her baby 20 feet below the surface, while an escort male, a whale hoping to breed with her, watched nearby. It was just before 5 p.m., and the ocean glistened in the late afternoon sun.
Too Close
Donning masks and fins, the swimmers quietly slid into the tepid water and lined up, shoulder to shoulder, as they'd done all week. It was a safeguard they'd been taught to keep individuals from scattering or getting too close to the animals. For more than an hour, they followed the whales, snapping underwater photos, enchanted by the loud, low-pitched song the male used. When the whales paused to sleep -- the baby on top of the mother so she could bring it to the surface every five minutes to breathe -- the group got within 20 feet of the pair.In the excitement, their line formation disappeared. Before she knew it, Janet Blackwelder found herself inches from the 3,000-pound baby. Reaching out, she gently touched it, then surfaced. "I can't believe it! I touched the baby!" she cried out. The whale had moved under her hand, "like it was letting me pet it," she said later. She could see Randy and Gwen nearby.
Just as Janet ducked back under, the water filled with bubbles. She and the Thorntons were nearly on top of the whales, and the mother and her calf appeared to be surfacing. "We were drawn into the whales by the current," says Randy, "and that startled the baby and woke the mother." Randy put his hands out in front of him, but the effect was the same as trying to stop a runaway freight train. The mother whale flipped her enormous tail up, smacking Randy in the right thigh with its 15-foot fluke, and then down, striking Janet on the left side from her hip to her head.
As Gwen was tossed 20 feet in the churning backwash, Randy felt himself sinking. His leg seared with pain, like somebody was stabbing him with a dagger. When he gathered the courage to look down, he saw his right leg was still attached but facing in the wrong direction. The force of the blow had snapped his thighbone in half like a dry twig. Incredibly, the break hadn't severed his femoral artery, or he'd have bled to death in minutes. Using only his arms, Randy managed to swim ten feet to the surface. Where was Gwen? he wondered. Had she been hit too? "Somebody help!" he shouted, scrambling to stay afloat.
When the water turned calm and bright stands of orange coral came back into focus, Bridgette Server took a quick look around. She'd been filming the whales sleeping when they'd suddenly moved away. She knew her mother had been nearby but didn't see her now. She felt a strong urge to turn around again. There was Janet, pale and listless, drifting to the bottom of the sea. The slap of the whale's tail had torn her mask off; her neck was bent at an angle and appeared to be broken.
Bridgette quickly dove down, grabbed hold of the large zipper on the back of her mom's scuba suit and pulled her to the surface. "My mom's dead! Where's my dad? My mom's dead!" she yelled. Too shocked to cry, she cradled Janet's head in the water. "Mom, can you hear me?" she asked.
Channeling the Pain
Don Blackwelder didn't hear his daughter cry out for help. After he surfaced and yanked off his mask, he could only hear Randy screaming in agony. He swam over and was soon joined by Gwen. "The whale hit my leg," Randy told them. "I can't swim." Don raised both of his arms above his head and waved -- the signal for help -- then grabbed Randy by the neck of his suit and ferried him 50 feet to the boat. He was surprised to find Bridgette dragging her mother through the water, aided by her husband and another swimmer."Quick! Let's get her aboard," said Christopher Guglielmo, the crew member who'd taken the group out to the reef. While Randy hung on to the side of the boat, Christopher and Don hauled Janet aboard to check for vitals. "She has a pulse," said Christopher. "She's alive."
Randy wanted to scream every time the yacht bounced over a wave. Captain Van Der Walt had put out a distress call, and an orthopedic surgeon aboard a nearby ship helped stabilize Randy's leg using a dive fin and a steel pole. Fearing that an artery might rupture if Randy was moved to a cabin below, the doctor said he'd have to stay on the deck.
The captain headed back to the Dominican Republic, weaving around coral pinnacles with care as he tried to get back quickly. Morphine shots from the first-aid kit on board helped somewhat, but Randy still felt as if his leg were being rubbed across a bed of nails. "Are we there yet?" he kept asking Gwen, who was lying by his side, rubbing his forehead with a cold compress. He tried to channel the pain into positive thoughts. On the other side of the deck, Janet groaned and opened her eyes. "What happened?" she asked Bridgette. The last thing she remembered was touching the whale calf. "Mom," her daughter replied, "you were kissed by the whale."
In 13 years of taking groups out to snorkel with humpbacks, Van Der Walt had never witnessed anything like the scene on his yacht that afternoon. He knew of not a single injury involving humans and whales in Silver Bank. "If the group hadn't separated in the water, this never would have happened," he says. "They got too close, and the mother whale felt it was time to move on." Still, says the captain, "it was an accident."
More than nine hours later, when the boat tied up at the dock in Puerto Plata, two ambulances were waiting to take Randy and Janet to Bournigal Medical Center. Janet, it was discovered, had suffered a bad concussion, bruises and rib injuries. She would be released from the hospital in a couple of days -- in time to make the flight back home to the States with the rest of the group. Doctors were worried, though, about a possible infection in Randy's leg. "If you don't let us operate," a doctor told him, "you'll die."
Worth the Agony
That evening, Randy was wheeled into an operating room he remembers as having concrete walls and open windows to let in the island breeze. After numbing him from the waist down, doctors used a surgical hacksaw to smooth the broken ends of his femur, then pounded a rod down the middle of his bone to hold the two pieces together. Randy's teeth vibrated every time the hammer made contact. This can't be happening, Randy thought. He closed his eyes and prayed, God, get me through this.While he recuperated that weekend, he and Gwen waited to hear whether their insurance company would send a private jet to fly them home. He was struggling to breathe; bone marrow had leaked into his bloodstream from his broken femur, causing an embolism in his lungs. When an American air medical crew appeared at his bedside five days after his surgery, Randy burst into tears. "Howdy, sailor," said one of the crew members. "Need a lift?"
"I know they did the best they could with what they had in the Dominican Republic, and I'll always be grateful," says Randy. "But I was convinced that I was going to die, that I had to get out of that hospital and to the States to get sufficient care."
Back home in Utah, Randy quickly recovered and now bears only a long scar and a limp from his ordeal. His doctor says his femur is healing nicely, though Randy says the rod he received is no longer used in the United States. Janet's rib injury has almost healed, but it took her weeks to regain memory lost from the concussion. One good thing came from her experience: Years of outdoor life had left Janet's hips out of joint, but "whale tail therapy whacked me into alignment," she says. She and Randy both say they'd love to return to Silver Bank someday, but next time, Janet will make sure she's watching from a safer distance.
"I don't blame the whale," Randy says. "We got in the way. We were in her environment." He pauses and laughs. "What happened to me was -- literally -- a fluke." All of the agony he endured was worth it, says Randy, to spend a few magical days swimming with the earth's largest creatures. "I'd go again," he says, "in a heartbeat."