The classic novel Moby Dick tells the story of a captain obsessed with capturing and killing a famous white whale. ‘Call me Ishmael’ is Herman Melville’s famous opening line. Nelson Bay photographer Ray Alley couldn’t resist saying those same words as Pro Counter contacted him to hear his own experience of obsessively trying to ‘capture’ a famous white whale, named ‘Migaloo’.
An illustration for Moby Dick by A. Burnham Shute Source: © Bettmann/CORBIS
During every whale-watching season, from 2000 to 2009, Ray had patiently waited for Migaloo, a rarest of the rare albino humpback whale, to appear off the beaches of Nelson Bay. Between those years, Ray was strictly a ‘professional whale-watching photographer’, and in 2004 made a name for himself by capturing the world’s first humpback triple breach.
‘That’s what really started it off and snowballed it for me. Up until then I had been shooting whales and never got anything really good, a few breaches and that sort of stuff,’ Ray recalled. ‘Then one afternoon, on June 28 at about 10 minutes to four my life changed, literally. One photo changed me from this lowly little backyard photographer no one had heard of, to an internationally-acclaimed wildlife photographer.’
The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Telegraph, Australian Geographic, and numerous other publications couldn’t pass up an opportunity to run such a rare image and contacted Ray.
He then bought a share in the whale-watching catamaran, Imagine, and began working six to seven days a week on the boat for the peak of the whale watching season, which runs for roughly six months of the year through the migratory period. From the get-go, Migaloo was always at the top of the agenda.
In terms of wildlife photography, photographing whales sits at the more challenging end of the spectrum.
‘You can’t click your fingers and say “jump guys”. It doesn’t work that way,’ Ray explained. ‘Whales are probably one of the hardest types of wildlife to get images of. Anything from lions, tigers, birds or fish – you can see your subject.’
‘A whale – you’ve got no idea where he is, and when he’s going to jump. You can tag a whale for hours on end, but it might only breach once – that’s 1.8 seconds.’
No, this isn’t the ‘white whale’, but another image of a breaching humpback taken by Ray. Picture: ©Ray Alley 2005
By 2009, Ray had spent so much time at sea ‘swinging around’ a Nikon D3S, with a 200m f2.8 lens with a teleconverter, his body ‘just started to fall to pieces,’ he said.
‘It weighs a bit. You have to hang on to one of those up to your eye level, for five to six hours a day. Continuously. If you have your camera down around your waist, you’ll never get one of these shots. Well at least not to the extent, quality and regularity that I did.
Both of Ray’s shoulders and elbows required reconstruction. The doctors said ‘whatever you’re doing on that boat, can you stop it? You’ve got that much plastic in you now that if you died we could throw a Tupperware party.’
With his health in mind, Ray sold his share of Imagine and has only been out whale watching a handful of times since. It seemed all hope was lost – Migaloo hadn’t been sighted since Ray first began, and less time on board thinned out the opportunities he’d have to spot the white whale. At least until June 20, 2014, when the crew of Imagine called Ray and told him the good news – Migaloo had returned.
The catamaran, Imagine, keeping its distance as two humpbacks put on a show Source: imaginecruises.com.au
Ray had seen footage of Migaloo recorded over a decade ago, back when the whale was about 15 years old. The beast that confronted him this year had grown considerably from the footage of the teenage whale swimming in between the hulls of Imagine.
‘When I saw that thing go up the other day, the whale I’ve been chasing for 14 years… I saw him two kilometres away first and thought “that’s him”!’ Ray said.
After about an hour of tagging Migaloo and his three fellow humpback compadres, one of the larger vessels in the chasing fleet had to turn back, prompting Ray to just grip the camera firmly to his face, and stare patiently through his viewfinder.
‘Normally what happens after these big boats leave after tagging a whale for a couple of hours, the whales will get really, really suspicious. They come up, and breach to have a look,’ he said.
And minutes later, just that happened.
‘All of a sudden he breached out of the corner of my left eye. I could see him going up, and I just put my finger on the shutter, and started taking photographs about 90 degrees away from him and just swung the camera around and picked him up in the viewfinder. Absolutely unreal’
Migaloo was the only known white humpback in the world until 2012 when another was spotted off the coast of Norway. There is currently speculation that Migaloo now has progeny, although there is no proof. Either way, Ray has managed to tick off one of his biggest challenges from the bucket list.
‘That was my Holy Grail. I can go to the grave as a happy old photographer. It is something spectacular that you’d love to see happen, but would never really expect it.’
While the mission was quite personal for Ray, he couldn’t have done it without the skipper, Ian Vogt, and the rest of the crew on Imagine.
Daliy Whale: The image of Migaloo breaching scored a front page on the UK Daily Mail
‘I’m the one who pushes the button and gets the image. There are a lot of people behind it to get these photos done,’ he said. ‘Without the boat, you’re stuffed. Without (a good) skipper, you’re up the creek even further.’
Ray has no doubt that Port Stephens is the whale-watching capital of Australia, and possibly even the world. While whales can be seen in many other locations, Port Stephens ‘is their playground’, and breaches are frequent.
The images of Migaloo are protected by Diimex, an ‘online digital media exchange’. We couldn’t reproduce them without paying a fee, as Pro Counter is a commercial website. (Though we aren’t quite commercial enough as yet to pay that fee!) On a more positive note, Diimex offers quite fair rates to photographers.
All the action can be viewed at the Daily Mail.