Whales at Beverage Reef

We pushed onto Beverage reef with the likely outcome of not being able to stop due to weather. Not one patch of sand or hermit crab or blade of green lives within 150 miles of here. All that exists is a tidal pass into a broad (2 miles diameter) lagoon, rolling green seas thrashing at the reef about a choppy sanctum, which is charted about 2 miles off its accurate position. We arrived in a lull, saw the breakers, found the pass and safely entered the protection of the reef.

Nick celebrated his 34th birthday by opening gifts eating fruit cake with cream cheese icing and cranberries. We clambered around the wreck ‘Liberty’ and dived the pass and outer reef.

We had a life time experience on our last day at Beverage. Spear fishing at the northern point of Beverage reef we were hanging over the end of a 500m long spur of reef about 80 foot deep that ran out off the corner of the atoll. The current was gently pushing up on the end of the spur, there was bait fish, a big school of barracuda, a dozen small sharks cruising in mid water, it all looked perfect, Nick said to me ‘honey, we are in the zone now, lets do 3 or 4 good dives each and see what turns up’, then he did his first dive, leveling out at about 40 foot he looked around and instantly saw 2 humpback whales about 200 feet back toward the atoll at the same depth as him. He looked up at me and pointed then made his way back up. We lay on the surface and the smaller of the two whales turned and swam straight at us, like he was going to eat us, we thought for sure that he was going to surface and we would be left high and dry on his 10 foot wide, barnacled, back. We were both terrified, but at the last moment when he was somewhere between 10 and 20 feet from us he bent in the middle and cruised under us and continued on his way. Wow, we never landed a fish at Beverage, we lost two to sharks, but the whale made it a favorite.