We’re Going to Die Now

A story from Tom Mustill.

Humpback whale breaching

Documentary filmmaker, Tom, and his friend Charlotte had a once-in-a-lifetime experience with a whale, that no one would wish upon their enemies. When the 40’ long humpback launched itself from beneath the waves like a surfacing submarine right next to their kayak and momentarily towered above them, Tom thought for sure it was all over. But his telling of this compelling tale will have readers alternating through fear, astonishment, relief, laughter and amazement.

TOM MUSTILL runs a small documentary film production company. He can usually be found at work with a crew of one or two other people. He pretty much does a little bit of everything. Tom finds a story, looks people up, contacts them to see if they are interested, directs interviews, works with film crews, chooses equipment, and works with the director of photography. Because he’s really into wildlife photography himself, he can often be found behind the camera or recording sound.

Tom then spends a few months working with his long-time editor Sabrina cutting the film, then follows up with all the back-end stuff, including trying to get a lot of buzz around the film so it will make a big impact. He wants to make sure the issues and people in his films benefit from the attention in a good way.

Tom’s work makes it easy for people to learn about, get interested in, and if they care, get involved in supporting the various projects his films cover. When not working on his own projects, Tom can be found working as a freelance director on other people’s films.

That said, if an alien were to try to decipher what he does everyday, according to Tom, they’d say ‘email’. He goes on exciting expeditions from time to time then edits them, but the number one thing he does is write emails! It’s all about communicating with the crew and people who have allowed him into their lives to tell their stories.

Born and raised in London, Tom calls himself a Londoner, a city boy at heart, though he’s always loved the natural world and being outside. London continues to be his base as he travels to places with a lot more wildlife.

Tom first came to Monterey on holiday with a big bunch of friends. He had previously met Tierney Thys at a wildlife conference in Bristol, and she’d said if he was ever in town, he should come check out what she was doing. She was away during his first visit, but Tom met with her partner who is an engineer at MBARI and showed him the ROVs they were designing.  The two of them looked out the window and there, really close to shore, were humpbacks fluking and lunge feeding. Tierney’s partner said Tom should really go whale watching to fully appreciate the whales, and the best way would be by kayak.

So Tom phoned up Monterey Bay Kayaks. They had two more places, so he reserved them, and that’s where Tom’s dramatic story with a whale begins. It was slightly ironic that it happened when he was on holiday, because obviously, he says, his job is to go and film animals, and he’d had never had an encounter like that in his job.

Tom has always loved the sea, experiencing it as a surfer and free diver. He got a degree in Zoology at Cambridge University, where he studied marine ecology, and ancient, underwater systems in the pre-Cambrian period, looking at fossil assemblages from 500 million years ago. When he was between school and university, he had volunteered on a coral monitoring project in Fiji.

When he left Cambridge University, Tom was very determined to become a conservation biologist. He worked in habitat restoration and management for a year or so. But then he thought he could have a better impact on the world and looking after natural systems doing storytelling about conservation.

His next career move led him to making tea with a TV company as an apprentice, a runner as its called. From there Tom simply worked his way up. The first big program he worked on was Inside Nature’s Giants, which won a BAFTA and other awards.

That’s how he met Joy Reidenberg. Tom had a whale they were going to dissect, and was told by a lion anatomy expert that they should call this American lady, because she knew all there was to know about the anatomy of whales. So he phoned her up wanting just a few tips, but she was so engaging and so knowledgeable that she ended up jumping on a plane, and a few hours later going straight to Ireland, heading out to the beach, taking charge of the entire dissection, explaining everything incredibly well, and she became a permanent member of their team on the series.

Since then Tom’s been making films specifically in the area he’s most interested in, which is where humans and the natural world meet, where humans and animals meet. He says we’re living in this age of tremendous change and tremendous discovery, and he finds it the most interesting thing, the stories that come from that zone.

There are very few places you can go that don’t have people in them, as well as animals. And Tom thinks audiences really respond to seeing other people in those stories. Makes them feel like they’re part of that wonderful natural world they are seeing. As Tom says, if you show them stories about people who are doing impressive and inspiring things, and doing them well, then it gives people hope to make them feel things aren’t all screwed.

His latest film project is ‘Humpback Whales: A Detective Story’, a true story that sprang from his epic kayak encounter with the breaching humpback.

Tom will be taking a bit of time off from filmmaking as he’s now engaged in writing a book. While working on the humpback whale film, he became fascinated with people who are using new technologies to try and understand animal languages or communications. He has a book deal with Harper Collins in the UK, and will be working on that project for the next year.

 You can watch Tom’s story on Youtube here: https://youtu.be/rbvqYhuKz24

WE’RE GOING TO DIE NOW 

So it was the 12th of September 2015. I’d joined a group of tourists going on a kayak tour out of Moss Landing. It was cold and misty, and extremely still. I was in a two-person kayak with my friend Charlotte, and there were, I think, three or four other kayakers in the little group that went out with us, and there were a lot of other people in boats on the water already.

And we paddled out of Moss Landing. As you know, you go past the sea otters and harbor seals. Normally you have to paddle quite far out to see any sort of whale if you’re lucky enough to see one, but that day there were a lot of whales all around and very, very close. So close to shore that even I think a couple of stand up paddle boarders had paddled out from Moss Landing.

I worked as an assistant on a whale watching boat in the Canary Islands when I was a teenager to make sure the boats don’t get too close to the whales and harass them. And as well as doing that I would take photographs of their fins for ID, so I’ve seen a fair few whales before. And Charlotte is an accountant, and she had never seen any whales before in her life.

And it was full on. I mean when you’re whale watching, you’re supposed to keep like a distance, and our guide made that very clear. You don’t harass the whales and you don’t want to get hurt. But that’s ok when you can see where the whales are. But it’s very difficult when there are suddenly whales arriving from different directions. You can’t outrun a whale in a kayak. You can’t move away from a whale that you can’t see, if it’s coming up to lunge feed underneath you.

So we did our best to keep our distance, and then I think we were pretty much ready to go in. You know, we could smell the fishy, broccoli breath and it was wafting over us. Got some amazing looks, and it was a totally wonderful whale watch. And we then turned back to Moss Landing, and we started paddling back to shore. We’d finished.

And then suddenly a humpback whale just came out of the water about two or three kayak lengths away from us and ahead of us. And I remember just sort of seeing the water – and it was so flat calm that day – and then just seeing the front of its snout just coming out, and it was like an elevator shooting up the side of a hotel or something. It moved so quickly, and it came from nowhere.  And then it was above us.

And I remember thinking, the things I thought were very simple. There was no fear cause it happened so quickly. One was, “Oh look, that’s a whale. It’s very close.” And the second thing was, “Oh no, it’s going to land on us!” And then I thought, “We’re going to die now,” because it was so big, and so inescapable. And I remember looking up at it and seeing it as it came down towards us. And I could see its ventral pleats. I could see the tubercles on its rostrum. I could see all the bumps on the leading edge of its pectoral fins. And just the level of detail was so strange, because you normally see that stuff through the water or quickly as it comes up and goes all back again.

It was just sort of looming at us. I can’t remember what happened next. I’ve replayed the video of it. You can see two dots in the kayak in the video that a tourist shot. One of them gets really small, and that’s me at the back of the kayak, further away from the humpback. And I think I threw my paddle away and I just flipped the kayak to run away from the whale as much as I could.

And the other one stays exactly the same height and that’s Charlotte. And she was just transfixed looking up at it, and as we later learned, as it looked down onto her. Because you can see in the video that it sticks its eyes further out as it rotates.

And then, I was under water. I remember moving incredibly quickly under water. I love diving in the sea and swimming around, but I’ve never moved that fast. I didn’t think it was possible to move that fast: that feeling of being in air, or being tumbled around, like if you jump off a cliff or something into the water, your stomach lurches, you go over a bump in a car. It was that sudden acceleration, but in water. And I remember it being very sort of white, and I’m thinking, “Oh, OK, I’m dead.” I’m in shock. All my arms and legs are broken.  So, this is just the bit where I fade out, or the bit where it starts to hurt.

Strangely I thought, I seem to still be conscious, and then I got spun around like a doll, like again, and I think that must have been as the tail moved, as the whale made off from away where we were.  I had a life vest on, and I could feel it sort of gently starting to pull me up, so I swam with that.

I remember it took – well it felt like it took some time to get back to the surface. I think in retrospect what happened was that I turned the kayak, the whale’s pectoral fin hit the nose of the kayak, and that pushed the kayak and us down under the water. But the impact shot us out of the kayak underneath the whale and the kayak, because we were pushed out of the kayak. We didn’t have any bruises or cuts or anything.

We had our skirts on, and my feet were around the pedals of the rudder while we were in the kayak, and then I got back to the surface and I saw Charlotte’s head bobbing around with a big grin, and I thought that’s impossible, she should be dead.  And I just thought, and I knew, I had known that she was dead, because she was closer to the whale than I was.

And then she was alive and I was alive, and the kayak bobbed up and people came over, and we grabbed onto the kayak. And then a whale came along the surface, like straight towards us and just underneath us and fluked. Just next to us. And I was thinking, I know that whales aren’t aggressive towards people. It’s very rare for them to do something that might seem aggressive, but what’s going on?

And then Kate Spencer sped over in her Fast Raft. I didn’t know that was Kate Spencer. I thought this sexy black speedboat was the Police or Coast Guard coming to rescue us. We looked up at them and thought, “Brilliant, they’re going to save us now.” But they just kind of shouted and said, “Are you ok?” And all the tourists on the boat were taking lots of pictures. And there was Sanctuary Cruises vessel on the other side of us, with like, you know, like the whole boat was leaning over as everyone was taking pictures. And we were floating in the water.

I don’t think anyone realized that the whale had landed on top of us, apart from people in our kayak trip who had been looking at us, because we were away from where all the whales were feeding. So everybody else was looking to the side of us, back out to sea. And so most of the video swings round to the side to catch the whale, and so I think most people just saw a splash, and then saw us bobbing in the water and thought, “Ah, they got knocked out of their kayak by the splash.”

And we were in shock, sort of just grinning and shivering, and we thought surely they’re going to rescue us now. But actually, our trip leader just asked us to get back in the kayak, and he tipped the water out and then tied it to another one. We paddled back to shore.

And I kept saying to Charlotte, you know, “What the heck just happened, expletive, expletive, expletive? Like that was absolutely insane”, and she just said, “Shut up, we’re not talking about this until we’re safely back on shore.”

And we paddled, and I remember just seeing all these school children, there must have been like a school group who were also just paddling out of Moss Landing, and I’m saying, “A humpback just breached on us”. I think they didn’t understand what I said, and they just went like (gestures big smile and thumbs up), and I thought, “Oh no, no one’s going to believe us,” you know, because I didn’t know somebody had filmed it.

I didn’t think anyone had even seen it, apart from the guys who were with us. And they were really upset, because they had just been looking, and they’d seen us one moment, and then they’d seen a whale land on us, and we’d been gone. And there was just this white water, and they were I think the most upset, the people who had actually been on the surface.

We then we got out, and they gave us a cup of hot chocolate. And we got in our car and we drove home. We were staying at an Air BnB. And our friend Louise was in charge of renting it, and we arrived and she said, “You’re late. We had to pack all your stuff for you. And if we don’t move out soon, there’s going to be a $25 late fee.” We said, “A humpback whale just landed on us.” And, our friend Louise said, “Well that’s fine, but if we don’t get out of here soon, there’s a $25 extra charge for the rental if we’re late checking out.”

So we both started to think, no one’s ever going to believe us. They’re going to think we’re exaggerating; we’ve made this up. Then all my friends in that group left, and I was going to go camping in Big Sur with another friend who lives in San Francisco and his parents. They drove up the road, and as I sat on the side of the road in Aptos, I said, “A humpback whale just breached on me,” and they said, “Oh, that sounds strange.”

And I said, “I’ll show you.” And I made them drive to Monterey Bay Kayaks, and I showed them the kayak. But it had a dent in it, but the dent is not as impressive as you’d think a humpback jumping onto you would cause. And I guess a piece of molded plastic is very hard to deform. And it was very bent, but I think my friend was imagining like a boat bent in two or something. So I think they didn’t really believe me, or they thought I was exaggerating.

And then we went camping in Big Sur, and that night we stood overlooking the sea. I was having a beer, and my friend was having a beer, and he said to me, “There’s a tarantula on your shoulder.” And I said, “Oh, ha ha, there’s a tarantula on your shoulder.” And he said, “No mate, there’s a tarantula on your shoulder.” And I, still thinking he was joking, just went “Ooh ew ah” and just like went towards him, and he just backed off. And then I felt this, oh (gesturing to his neck), that does feel a bit strange there. So I whipped my shirt off and threw it on the ground. There were some other people at the campsite, and I think they just thought like, “Who’s the weird guy who’s drunk too much?”

This tarantula just scuttled out, and I thought, “What’s going on today?” “How can I describe any of this to anyone and have them believe me?”

So my friend was there camping with his girlfriend at the time, and his parents hadn’t met her before. I kept saying, “The humpback whale…”, and trying to talk about it, and they’re like, “That’s very interesting Tom.”  So tell me (to the girlfriend), what do your parents do?” You know, it was very weird and very anti-climatic for such a dramatic event.

And I remember lying awake that night and just sort of looking up in the tent, and just sort of still seeing that picture of this whale with all the water streaming off it, just sort of frozen there, and I remember thinking, “I must remember this. I’m never going to experience something like this again. I must freeze it in my head.”

And then we drove back to San Francisco the next day, and I was googling every second, you know, like ‘whale’, ‘humpback’, ‘Monterey Bay’, in the hope that somebody had taken a photo or something. Then I saw this YouTube video. And, I was like, “Yes! People are going to believe me!”

By then 200,000 people had watched it, and by the time I was getting on my flight the next day, I think a million people had watched it. So I phoned my mom, and I was like, “Ah, you’re gonna see this story, I’m fine, everything’s ok”, and then I got on the plane. And when I landed another couple of million people had watched it, and I had hundreds of missed calls on my phone. People were phoning my work - the BBC, previous employers, family - and Charlotte and I just got sort of swept up in it. And this video went viral and it became a global news story.

There were cartoons of a whale jumping into a boat in the British newspaper, with the Prime Minister and his Chancellor of the Exchequer in a little boat, with the leader of the opposition as a tiny whale about to land on them. It was totally bizarre!

And then we had almost a stranger experience of being part of the news cycle, which is really odd, because suddenly we were just being almost besieged by people. And you’d open up Facebook, and there’re hundreds of people trying to get to you to ask us to talk about it. So we went to the BBC and told our story, and then it calmed down again, and life sort of went back to normal.

But my life couldn’t really go back to normal, cause I’ve always been interested in whales. My fiancé actually found a photo album of mine from a holiday to Canada I had as a child, and there were no family pictures in it. It’s just postcards of killer whales that I’d collected. And I just thought, “I should follow this.” And every time anything weird happened or anything happened unusual to a whale, all of my friends now thought of me as the whale guy, so they’d send the item to me. And I got more and more drawn in.

Well, first I was astonished about how much you could learn about individual whales, and the identification of them, Happywhale and Cascadia and the work they’ve been doing for over twenty years. And then I got interested in the people, in the disentanglement, the various disentanglement outfits, and the scientists, and the whale watchers. And I thought, “This is an amazing community.” “Maybe I could make a film, about not just a person or a team, but a community who share an interest in an animal, and use that as a way of showing the problems that those animals face, using my experience as a hook into that to get people interested with this dramatic moment, in a much bigger story about people who like whales, and about what’s happening to whales. And so that’s what I did