You and your partner are floating weightless, gazing out into the dark abyss. It’s cold in your suit, and the oxygen tank makes your movements slower because of the extra weight and bulk. You can’t hear much outside the noise of you breathing into the regulator.

Quietly, between breaths, you begin to hear creaks and clicks and long whistles. You look over at your partner, but she doesn’t appear to hear anything unusual, so you go back to your business, occasionally glancing back out into the blackness.

Suddenly, something begins to materialize in your peripheral vision. Two huge dark figures come swooping out of the darkness. Are they coming straight at you? You look over at your partner and her eyes are as wide as flying saucers. It registers. Aliens! Two huge alien space ships are flying at you and you are frozen.

They’re humpback whales, not aliens, silly.

(Camilla and the aliens)

(Camilla, Tess, and the aliens)

Ok, I have not suddenly become an astronaut, I’m still in the Turks and Caicos, but yesterday I had an out of this world experience. Our dive team got a greeting from two humpback whales, and my dive partner, Sophie, momentarily thought that we were having extraterrestrial contact with aliens. It was unequivocally the best dive I have ever been on. The whales passed within 60-80ft of our dive group, swimming along the edge of the TCI deep water trench. Camilla cried underwater, and I’m sure one of us peed a little in their wetsuit. With the seemingly infinite visibility of the Caribbean, we watched them glide across and back out of view into the dark blue waters.

After the whales were out of view our dive group had an underwater party. We danced and hugged, and high-fived, and used up all of our air in our excitement, so we soon had to return to the surface.

(Story inspired by this wonderful dive buddy Sophie who thought we were having an extraterrestrial encounter)

On another note we also saw two massive nurse sharks on this dive.

(Me just trying to blend in with the local crowd here. Ft. two 20ft nurse sharks)