Dive into Dominica's realm of fire

Whale tales and witch’s brew
My dive days at the Comfort Castle Dive Lodge — two-tank morning dives — leave plenty of free afternoons for topside explorations, and hunting for Dominica’s leviathans is one of them. The following afternoon I join a handful of European tourists and Dive Dominica guide Marcus John Baptiste on a whale watch.

Drawn by the deep offshore waters and an abundance of prey species like squid and cuttlefish, a resident population of sperm whales flocks to the water surrounding Dominica. Marcus says the odds of seeing at least one whale are 85 percent, and on some occasions he’s spotted as many as 14 individuals in a single pod. But they aren’t the only cetaceans in the sea. As we leave Roseau Harbor beneath the gaze of cruise ships as large and wedding-cake white as icebergs, a pod of pantropical spotted dolphins explodes off our bow wave, wagging their tails and doing corkscrew spins. My boat mates respond with delighted Dutch squeals.

We’re about a mile out when Marcus kills the motor and lets us drift in the swell. He lowers a wooden boom with a waterproof microphone over the side and hands me a headset. “See if you can hear them,” he says.

I listen intently to the babble of waves against the hull and the coursing of blood in my ears. Marcus rotates the hydrophone and calls out, “East.”

Nothing but the cottony silence of the deep.

“South.” Still nothing.

“West.”

That’s when I hear it. Not the sorrowful and almost nostalgic songs of the humpback whales, but a faint staccato clicking. Deliberate, fast and intense. Sperm whales.

“They’re hunting squid way down,” Marcus says when he takes the headphones and listens.

Sperm whales have been known to dive more than 3,000 feet, he says. “Marine biologists think they use sonar both to locate their prey in the dark and also to stun them.”

He fine-tunes the hydrophone and passes the headset to the rest of the group. Smiles crack on every face. Somewhere below us and not so far away, an ancient battle is underway.

The hunting must be good, because after an hour of scanning the sun-burnt waves, our only rewards are bloodshot eyes. We head farther out — four miles, five, six and finally eight. With each mile, Dominica retreats in our wake, the villages vanishing so that only a raw green pyramid capped with clouds rises to our east. The low sun shears through the mountain mists and illuminates the island like cut jade. The swell is gentle and I get sleepy. I lay on the deck on my back and watch a magnificent frigate bird hanging in the blue bowl above.

I’m asleep when Marcus cries out, “Thar she blows!”

Seriously.

The boat deck sounds with barefoot smacks as a crowd forms on the bow, and Marcus throttles the cat into action. He swings in several hundred yards behind the two whales and then idles the engine, and we drift. Before us are a mother and calf, their wrinkled, black backs awash in sea foam.

“She’s nursing,” Marcus says excitedly.

Now and then twin lazy, lopsided spouts huff loudly from the animals that inspired Ahab’s archenemy Moby Dick.

“They’re breathing faster,” Marcus says, and he urges us to get our cameras ready. “They’re preparing to dive.”

Within seconds they arch their knobbed backs, and a perfect pair of flukes rise, trailing golden cascades. Then they slip soundlessly into the wine-dark sea. As passengers excitedly scroll through their digital shots and share trophy images, Marcus decides it’s time to celebrate. He breaks out the cinnamon-spiced rum punch for his passengers, and we leave the whales to hunt for kraken in the deep blue sea.

Over the next few days, I dive more and more sites around the lip of Soufriere Bay, which is only a 20-minute ride from Castle Comfort Dive Lodge. La Sorcière (the Witch) is a wall that starts in the morning shadow of lava cliffs, and quickly becomes my favorite. It is so close to shore that Aaron warns us not to swim near the cliff during our surface interval. “Stones can fall at any time.”

Stones apparently aren’t the only things that have fallen from the cliff. It’s my fourth time diving here, and I’ve gotten three different versions of how the site got its supernatural moniker. Aaron manages to wrap all three stories into one.

“Many years ago the Caribs used to worship the sun from the ledge at the top,” he says as we dutifully crane our heads back and stare almost straight up. “And if their wives were unfaithful,” he adds, “they would throw them into the sea from there.”

We all murmur our horror, but Aaron’s not finished.

“Also,” he continues, “the Caribs who didn’t want to be enslaved would jump off the cliff and commit suicide here. So their spirits are supposed to be around as well.”

If the dive site is crowded with spirits, it’s also crowded with life. This morning we drop in over the sandy ledge in 15 feet of water and immediately spot a pair of flying gurnards, wings outspread, shuffling along the bottom like lizard minesweepers. At the rim of a tumbledown wall stacked with blue plate corals, Aaron points out a green frogfish about the size of a cell phone. It takes me a good minute to find its unblinking eye and another minute to realize it’s upside down. The highlight happens at 60 feet, when Aaron does his little free-love rodeo dance to celebrate a pair of yellow seahorses moored at the base of a sea plume.

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