The BEST experience of my Life! Freediving with Humpbacks in Tonga

It's late, I'm tired, and we are going to Tonga. Say something to the camera. She's very talkative. So we're in Nandi Airport in Fiji, and we're meant to be working on the mulch logs, education materials, and I'm working, I'm working hard, but look what's going on here. My computer, Alexi's computer. So it's the first morning in Tonga, and I am jet lagged, so I've not been awake since like four in the morning, and here is the sunrise. It's like a local rugby team or something like that training on the wharf here. Epic. Good morning, good morning. What do we have for breakfast on our first day of whale diving? Curry. Curry and sausage. Oh yeah. Watermelon. Breakfast for champions. Of course. Oats. Always eat oats for breakfast. So, welcome to English lessons with Elena Katochka. So, Elena, what animal are we diving with today? Kitty. We'll see you out there. Today is the first day of our whale swim tour, and we're heading out. We have no idea what we're doing, but we're all very keen. So keen. Whenever we see a whale, we approach slowly. Right, so we are almost at wherever the whales are, and everyone's gearing up, getting ready to go, and we're pretty keen. There's a lot of buzz going on right now. Hi. We were already geared up and ready to go before we really spotted our first whale, and when we did, they weren't super keen on swimming with us. The first whales that we saw were on their way somewhere else, and they just passed by and swam off. It was incredible, but we didn't get close enough to have the experience that we really wanted. But very quickly, we found our first mother and calf. This was exciting. They were swimming so slowly, so comfortably, they didn't mind us there. They seemed very comfortable with our presence. The camera doesn't quite show just how big they are. You don't get the feeling of how monstrous and epic they are in the water. You are the only person who has you, if you throw away your plans. We headed to a remote little island for lunch, and it was just us, all alone in the world, in this tiny little island. Alexei is no longer a professional freediver, he is now a full-time Instagram husband. Yep, yep, there he goes again. When we got back on the boat, we stumbled across four or five male whales, all swimming and competing against each other in a display of dominance. It was incredible. The whales would race each other, and then one whale would swim in front and cut ahead of the other whales, causing them to rear their heads up out of the water to avoid a collision. It was incredible to see these huge, huge 25-ton whales swimming and racing each other. It wouldn't have been safe to get into the water with them, so we just watched it from the boat. On our way back home in the shallows near the island, where the visibility wasn't very good, we found another mother and calf, and they were beautiful. They were quite calm, and this mother was the biggest whale we saw of the day. She was huge. Dan, how'd you go, man? How was your first day with the whales? Oh, it went really well. It was possibly the best day of my life. Actually? Actually the best day of my life. That's sick. Really, really happy. Oh, good. So we just got back from the boat. I had a shower. These guys don't smell like they've had a shower. And now we're going out to a restaurant in town called Friends Cafe, because we're friends. We had a good visit this morning. Let's check what food I would drink. So here you have a Russian table, and we have a strawberry milkshake, we have English breakfast tea, we have coconut. Oh, I believe we have a Coke over there. And Coke. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's fine. And then we have a lot of beer. That's just the breaking news about Russian and alcohol. The only reason why they're not drinking is because there's no vodka on the island. Our second day on the boat was rough. There was a strong wind, and it was very, very choppy. And just when we thought all hope was lost, there were two beautiful sub-adults, a male and a female. And as we jumped in the water, they turned around and started swimming with us, playing with us, completely interacting with us. They seemed curious or interested in what we were doing. When I imagined swimming with whales, I never imagined that the whales would be interested in swimming with us. I never imagined that they would be so playful. This is by far the greatest diving experience of my life. And we were all just so frantic, swimming up and down. No one had any time to breathe or prepare for a dive. It was just pure, frenzied, beautiful madness. And give us your best whale puns. Welcome, whale, come to Tonga. Whale, whale, whale, what do we have here? Whale, hello there. Whale, good morning. Whale, how are you doing? That's enough. Kiel, did you have fun today? I had a whale-y good time. Alright, who is excited for whales? Alright, let's try that again. Who is excited for whales? So we have two boats that we're using while we're here. We have the wet boat, which is this boat over here. And we have the dry boat, which is this boat over here. And we take turns going back and forth, so today is our day on the dry boat. And we are loving life. We are loving life. They're leaving without Alexi. Goodbye, goodbye everyone. Come back. Are you keen? Here we go. At first, this adult female wasn't really interested in swimming with us. And so I swam down next to her and started spinning in circles. And when she saw that, she must have developed some kind of interest because she spun back and then she stayed and hung around with us and swam with us for about 30 minutes. That's the truly incredible thing about swimming with humpback whales, is that they fully engage with you. They play back. They communicate with you. It's quite emotional, to be honest. By the way, if you are keen to come and dive with these humpback whales with us next year in 2019, we have trips running in August. Send me a message if you're interested, or we'll put a link in the description below. Alright, we've just got out of the water. We were diving with, was it a sub-adult? Yeah. Sorry? An adult! A beautiful big adult whale. And he or she, she was super playful and it was epic. So then we're out there and we've all had a good swim with it and this other boat just comes in hot. And scares the bloody whale away. You can see the body language just change the second it gets in. And then I get on the radio, which I didn't know was public, and start screaming and swearing my head off at this other boat and it turns out they heard everything. We stopped in for lunch at yet another beautiful, remote, tropical island that we had all to ourselves. Every day we'd been having lunch at a different island and it was magic, absolute magic. On the fourth day, the wind had really picked up so it was going to make it almost impossible to find any whales and it would mean that we'd just spend seven hours out on the water getting beaten to hell by the weather. So we found ourselves a nice little calm spot tucked in behind an island and spent the day doing a little bit of freediving training, a little bit of exploration, a little bit of swimming around on the reef. It was really nice. I mean, any kind of diving where you have crystal clear 40 metre visibility is just a day well spent or a dive well spent. So I've actually got to call this trip early and go home. Basically, Erin was three months pregnant and she was in Australia and she just went and had her 12-week scan and it turns out that the baby actually stops developing at about eight weeks. So nothing's been going on for the past four weeks and we didn't know. So we've had a miscarriage. So obviously this trip is going to go on for a bit longer but I've got to go home and have a good day and recoup. So I'll see you in Sydney. And you might want to check out this video because I think you will like it.